Soliloquies in England and later soliloquies

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND
AND LATER SOLILOQUIES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

CHARACTER AND OPINION IN
THE UNITED STATES. With
Reminiscences of WILLIAM JAMES and
JOSIAH ROYCE and Academic Life in
America.

LITTLE ESSAYS DRAWN FROM
THE WORKS OF GEORGE SANTA-
YANA. By LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH.

THE LIFE OF REASON. Five Vols.

INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY
AND RELIGION.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY.

CONSTABLE • LONDON • BOMBAY • SYDNEY

SOLILOQUIES IN
ENGLAND •

AND LATER SOLILOQUIES

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA

CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
LONDON • BOMBAY - SYDNEY

First published 192

PREFACE

MANY of these Soliloquies have appeared in The Athenaeum,
and one or more in The London Mercury, The Nation, The
New Republic, The Dial, and The Journal of Philosophy.
The author's thanks are due to the Editors of all these
reviews for permission to reprint the articles.

For convenience, three Soliloquies on Liberty, written
in 1915, have been placed in the second group ; and perhaps
it should be added that not a few of the later pieces were
written in France, Spain, or Italy, although still for the
most part on English themes and under the influence of
English impressions.

4SG074

CONTENTS

PAGE

PROLOGUE ... i

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND, 1914-1918

1. ATMOSPHERE . . . . .n

2. GRISAILLE . . . / . .13

3. PRAISES OF WATER . . . .15

4. THE Two PARENTS OF VISION . . .17

5. AVERSION FROM PLATONISM . . .18

6. CLOUD CASTLES . . . . .19

7. CROSS-LIGHTS . . . . -23

8. HAMLET'S QUESTION . . . .27

9. THE BRITISH CHARACTER . . . .29

10. SEAFARING . . . . . .32

11. PRIVACY . . . . . -35

12. THE LION AND THE UNICORN . . .39

13. DONS . . . . . -43

14. APOLOGY FOR SNOBS . . . -45

15. THE HIGHER SNOBBERY . . . .49

1 6. DISTINCTION IN ENGLISHMEN . . -52

17. FRIENDSHIPS . . . . -55

1 8. DICKENS ..... eg

19. THE HUMAN SCALE . . . .73

20. ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE . . . -77

21. THE ENGLISH CHURCH . . . -83

22. LEAVING CHURCH . . . .88

23. DEATH-BED MANNERS . . . .90

vii

viii SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

PAGE

24. WAR SHRINES . . . . .92

25. TIPPERARY . . . / -99

26. SKYLARKS . . . . . .107

27. AT HEAVEN'S GATE . . . . 113

LATER SOLILOQUIES, 1918-1921

28. SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE . . v . 119

29. IMAGINATION . . . » .122

30. THE WORLD'S A STAGE . . . .126

31. MASKS . . . . . . 128

32. THE TRAGIC MASK. .. ' . . .131

33. THE COMIC MASK . , . . .135

34. CARNIVAL . . . . . .139

35. QUEEN MAB .... . 144

36. A CONTRAST WITH SPANISH DRAMA . .149

37. THE CENSOR AND THE POET . . . 155

38. THE MASK OF THE PHILOSOPHER . , * .160

39. THE VOYAGE OF THE SAINT CHRISTOPHER . 161

40. CLASSIC LIBERTY . . . . . 165

41. GERMAN FREEDOM . . . . . 169

42. LIBERALISM AND CULTURE . - . . 173

43. THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM . . . 178

44. JOHN BULL AND HIS PHILOSOPHERS . . 190

45. OCCAM'S RAZOR . . . . .194

46. EMPIRICISM. . . , . , 198

47. THE BRITISH HEGELIANS . . , .201

48. THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY . '. ; . 207

49. THE PSYCHE . . . . > 217

50. REVERSION TO PLATONISM . . . ;.„ 224

51. IDEAS .... . 228

52. THE MANSIONS OF HELEN . . . . 236

53. THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS •„ . .241

54. ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS . „ . . 245

55. HERMES THE INTERPRETER . . .259

PROLOGUE

THE outbreak of war in the year 1914 found me by chance
in England, and there I remained, chiefly at Oxford, until
the day of the peace. During those five years, in rambles
to Iffley and Sandford, to Godstow and Wytham, to the
hospitable eminence of Chilswell, to Wood Eaton or
Nuneham or Abingdon or Stanton Harcourt,

Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,

these Soliloquies were composed, or the notes scribbled
from which they have been expanded. Often over Port
Meadow the whirr of aeroplanes sent an iron tremor through
these reveries, and the daily casualty list, the constant sight
of the wounded, the cadets strangely replacing the under
graduates, made the foreground to these distances. Yet
nature and solitude continued to envelop me in their
gentleness, and seemed to remain nearer to me than all
that was so near. They muffled the importunity of the
hour ; perhaps its very bitterness and incubus of horror
drove my thoughts deeper than they would otherwise
have ventured into the maze of reflection and of dreams.
It is a single maze, though we traverse it in opposite moods,
and distinct threads conduct us ; for when the most dire
events have assumed their punctiform places in the history
of our lives, where they will stand eternally, what are
they but absurd episodes in a once tormenting dream ?
And when our despised night-dreams are regarded and
respected as they deserve to be (since all their troubles are
actual and all their tints evident), do they prove more
arbitrary or less significant than our waking thoughts, or
than those more studious daylight fictions which we call
history or philosophy ? The human mind at best is a sort

I B

2 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

of song ; the music of it runs away with the words, and
even the words, which pass for the names of things, are but
poor wild symbols for their unfathomed objects. So are
these Soliloquies compared with their occasions ; and I
should be the first to hate their verbiage, if a certain
spiritual happiness did not seem to breathe through it,
and redeem its irrelevance. Their very abstraction from
the time in which they were written may commend them
to a free mind. Spirit refuses to be caught in a vice ; it
triumphs over the existence which begets it. The moving
I world which feeds it is not its adequate theme. Spirit
hates its father and its mother. It spreads from its burn
ing focus into the infinite, careless whether that focus burns
to ashes or not. From its pinnacle of earthly time it
pours its little life into spheres not temporal nor earthly,
and half in playfulness, half in sacrifice, it finds its joy in
the irony of eternal things, which know nothing of it.

Spirit, however, cannot fly from matter without
material wings ; the most abstract art is compacted of
images, the most mystical renunciation obeys some passion
of the heart. Images and passion, even if they are not
easily recognizable in these Soliloquies as now coldly
written down, were not absent from them when inwardly
spoken. The images were English images, the passion
was the love of England and, behind England, of Greece.
What I love in Greece and in England is contentment in
finitude, fair outward ways, manly perfection and simplicity.
Admiration for England, of a certain sort, was instilled
into me in my youth. My father (who read the language
with ease although he did not speak it) had a profound
respect for British polity and British power. In this
admiration there was no touch of sentiment nor even of
sympathy ; behind it lay something like an ulterior con
tempt, such as we feel for the strong man exhibiting at i
fair. The performance may be astonishing but the achieve
ment is mean. So in the middle of the nineteenth century
an intelligent foreigner, the native of a country materially
impoverished, could look to England for a model of that
irresistible energy and public discipline which afterwards
were even more conspicuous in Bismarckian Germany and
in the United States. It was admiration for material

PROLOGUE 3

progress, for wealth, for the inimitable gift of success ;
and it was not free, perhaps, from the poor man's illusion,
who jealously sets his heart on prosperity, and lets it blind
him to the subtler sources of greatness. We should none
of us admire England to-day, if we had to admire it only
for its conquering commerce, its pompous noblemen, or its ,
parliamentary government. I feel no great reverence jj
even for the British Navy, which may be in the junk-shop j |
to-morrow ; but I heartily like the British sailor, with his '
clear-cut and dogged way of facing the world. It is
health, not policy nor wilfulness, that gives true strength
in the moral world, as in the animal kingdom ; nature and
fortune in the end are on the side of health. There is, or
was, a beautifully healthy England hidden from most
foreigners ; the England of the countryside and of the
poets, domestic, sporting, gallant, boyish, of a sure and
delicate heart, which it has been mine to feel beating,
though not so early in my life as I could have wished. In
childhood I saw only Cardiff on a Sunday, and the docks
of Liverpool ; but books and prints soon opened to me
more important vistas. I read the poets ; and although
British painting, when it tries to idealize human subjects,
has always made me laugh, I was quick to discern an
ethereal beauty in the landscapes of Turner. Furgueson's
Cathedrals of England, too, and the great mansions in the
Italian style depicted in the eighth edition of the Encyclo
paedia Britannica, revealed to me even when a boy the
rare charm that can envelop the most conventional things
when they are associated with tender thoughts or with
noble ways of living.

It was with a premonition of things noble and tender,
and yet conventional, that after a term at the University
of Berlin I went to spend my first holidays in England.
Those were the great free days of my youth. I had lived
familiarly in Spain and in the United States : I had had
a glimpse of France and of Germany, and French literature
had been my daily bread : it had taught me how to think,
but had not given me much to think about. I was not
mistaken in surmising that in England I should find a
tertium quid, something soberer and juster than anything
I yet knew, and at the same time greener and richer.

4 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

I felt at once that here was a distinctive society, a way of
living fundamentally foreign to me, but deeply attractive.
At first all gates seemed shut and bristling with incom-
munication ; but soon in some embowered corner I found
the stile I might climb over, and the ancient right of way.
Those peaceful parks, and those minds no less retired,
seemed positively to welcome me ; and though I was still
divided from them by inevitable partitions, these were in
places so thin and yielding, that the separation seemed
hardly greater than is requisite for union and sympathy
between autonomous minds. Indeed, I was soon satisfied
that no climate, no manners, no comrades on earth (where
nothing is perfect) could be more congenial to my com
plexion. Not that I ever had the least desire or tendency
-to become an Englishman. Nationality and religion are
like our love and loyalty towards women : things too
radically intertwined with our moral essence to be changed
honourably, and too accidental to the free mind to be
worth changing. My own origins were living within me ;
by their light I could see clearly that this England was
pre-eminently the home of decent happiness and a quiet
pleasure in being oneself. I found here the same sort of
manliness which I had learned to love in America, yet
softer, and not at all obstreperous ; a manliness which
when refined a little creates the gentleman, since its
instinct is to hide its strength for an adequate occasion
and for the service of others. It is self-reliant, but with
a saving touch of practicality and humour ; for there is a
becoming self-confidence, based on actual performance,
like the confidence of the athlete, and free from any
exorbitant estimate of what that performance is worth.
Such modesty in strength is entirely absent from the
effusive temperament of the Latin, who is cocky and
punctilious so long as his conceit holds out, and then
utterly humbled and easily corrupted ; entirely absent
also from the doctrinaire of the German school, in his
dense vanity and officiousness, that nothing can put to
shame. So much had I come to count on this sort of
manliness in the friends of my youth, that without it the
most admirable and gifted persons seemed to me hardly
men : they fell rather into an ambiguous retinue, the

PROLOGUE 5

camp followers of man, cleverer but meaner than himself—
the priests, politicians, actors, pedagogues, and shop
keepers. The man is he who lives and relies directly on
nature, not on the needs or weaknesses of other people.
These self-sufficing Englishmen, in their reserve and
decision, seemed to me truly men, creatures of fixed
rational habit, people in whose somewhat inarticulate
society one might feel safe and at home. The low pressure
at which their minds seemed to work showed how little
they were alarmed about anything : things would all be
managed somehow. They were good company even when
they said nothing. Their aspect, their habits, their
invincible likes and dislikes seemed like an anchor to me
in the currents of this turbid age. They were a gift of the
gods, like the sunshine or the fresh air or the memory of
the Greeks : they were superior beings, and yet more
animal than the rest of us, calmer, with a different scale
ot consciousness and a slower pace of thought. There were
glints in them sometimes of a mystical oddity ; they loved
the wilds ; and yet ordinarily they were wonderfully sane
and human, and responsive to the right touch. Moreover,
these semi-divine animals could talk like men of the world.
If some of them, and not the least charming, said little
but "Oh, really," and " How stupid of me," I soon
discovered how far others could carry scholarly distinction,
rich humour, and refinement of diction. I confess, however,
that when they were very exquisite or subtle they seemed
to me like cut flowers ; the finer they were the frailer, and
the cleverer the more wrong-headed. Delicacy did not
come to them, as to Latin minds, as an added ornament,
a finer means of being passionate, a trill in a song that
flows full-chested from the whole man ; their purity was
Puritanism, it came by exclusion of what they thought
lower. It impoverished their sympathies, it severed them
from their national roots, it turned to affectation or
fanaticism, it rendered them acrid and fussy and eccentric
and sad. It is truly English, in one sense, to fume against
England, individuality tearing its own nest ; and often
these frantic poses neutralize one another and do no harm
on the whole. Nevertheless it is the full-bodied Englishman
who has so far ballasted the ship, he who, like Shakespeare,

6 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

can wear gracefully the fashion of the hour, can play
with fancy, and remain a man. When he ceases to be
sensual and national, adventurous and steady, reticent and
religious, the Englishman is a mad ghost ; and wherever
he prevails he turns pleasant England, like Greece, into a
memory.

Those first holidays of mine, when I was twenty-three
years of age, laid the foundation of a life-long attachment —
of which these Soliloquies are a late fruit — to both Oxford
and Cambridge : not so much to the learned society of
those places as to their picturesque aspects and to the
possibility of enjoying there in seclusion the intense com
panionship of the past and of the beautiful ; also the
intense companionship of youth, to which more advanced
years in themselves are no obstacle, if the soul remains
free. I have never liked the taste of academic straw ; but
there are fat grains and seeds of novelty even at universities,
which the lively young wits that twitter in those shades
pick up like hungry sparrows, yet without unmitigated
seriousness ; and unmitigated seriousness is always out of
place in human affairs. Let not the unwary reader think
me flippant for saying so ; it was Plato, in his solemn old
age, who said it. He added that our ignominious condition
forces us, nevertheless, to be often terribly in earnest.
Wanton and transitory as our existence is, and comic as
it must appear in the eyes of the happy gods, it is all in
all to our mortal nature ; and whilst intellectually we may
judge ourselves somewhat as the gods might judge us, and
may commend our lives to the keeping of eternity, our
poor animal souls are caught inextricably in the toils of
time, which devours us and all our possessions. The artist
playing a farce for others suffers a tragedy in himself.
When he aspires to shed as much as possible the delusions
of earthly passion, and to look at things joyfully and
unselfishly, with the clear eyes of youth, it is not because
he feels no weight of affliction, but precisely because he
feels its weight to the full, and how final it is. Lest it
should seem inhuman of me to have been piping soliloquies
whilst Rome was burning, I will transcribe here some
desperate verses extorted from me by events during those
same years. I am hardly a poet in the magic sense of the

PROLOGUE 7

word, but when one's thoughts have taken instinctively a
metrical form, why should they be forbidden to wear it ?
I do not ask the reader to admire these sonnets, but to
believe them.

A PREMONITION

Cambridge, October 1913

Grey walls, broad fields, fresh voices, rippling weir,
I know you well 7 ten faces, for each face
That passes smiling, haunt this hallowed place,
And nothing not thrice noted greets me here.
Soft watery winds, wide twilight skies and clear,
Refresh my spirit at its founts of grace,
And a strange sorrow masters me, to pace
These willowed paths, in this autumnal year.
Soon, lovely England, soon thy secular dreams,
Thy lisping comrades, shall be thine no more.
A world's loosed troubles flood thy gated streams
And drown, methinks, thy towers ; and the tears start
As if an iron hand had clutched my heart,
And knowledge is a pang, like love of yore.

THE UNDERGRADUATE KILLED IN BATTLE

Oxford, 1915

Sweet as the lawn beneath his sandalled tread,
Or the scarce rippled stream beneath his oar,
So gently buffeted it laughed the more,
His life was, and the few blithe words he said.
One or two poets read he, and reread ;
One or two friends with boyish ardour wore
Close to his heart, incurious of the lore
Dodonian woods might murmur overhead.
Ah, demons of the whirlwind, have a care,
What, trumpeting your triumphs, ye undo !
The earth once won, begins your long despair
That never, never is his bliss for you.
He breathed betimes this clement island air
And in unwitting lordship saw the blue.

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

THE DARKEST HOUR
Oxford, 1917

Smother thy flickering light, the vigil's o'er.
Hope, early wounded, of his wounds is dead.
Many a night long he smiled, his drooping head
Laid on thy breast, and that brave smile he wore
Not yet from his unbreathing lips is fled.
Enough : on mortal sweetness look no more,
Pent in this charnel-house, fling wide the door
And on the stars that killed him gaze instead.
The world's too vast for hope. The unteachable sun
Rises again and will reflood his sphere,
Blotting with light what yesterday was done ;
But the unavailing truth, though dead, lives on,
And in eternal night, unkindly clear,
A cold moon gilds the waves of Acheron.

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND
1914-1918

ATMOSPHERE

THE stars lie above all countries alike, but the atmosphere
that intervenes is denser in one place than in another ;
and even where it is purest, if once its atoms catch the
sunlight, it cuts off the prospect beyond. In some climates
the veil of earthly weather is so thick and blotted that
even the plodder with his eyes on the ground finds its
density inconvenient, and misses his way home. The
advantage of having eyes is neutralized at such moments,
and it would be better to have retained the power of going
on all fours and being guided by scent. In fact human
beings everywhere are like marine animals and live in a
congenial watery medium, which like themselves is an
emanation of mother earth ; and they are content for the
most part to glide through it horizontally at their native
level. They ignore the third, the vertical dimension ; or
if they ever get some inkling of empty heights or rigid
depths where they could not breathe, they dismiss that
speculative thought with a shudder, and continue to dart
about in their familiar aquarium, immersed in an opaque
fluid that cools their passions, protects their intellect
from mental dispersion, keeps them from idle gazing, and
screens them from impertinent observation by those who
have no business in the premises.

The stellar universe that silently surrounds them, if
while swimming they ever think of it, seems to them
something foreign and not quite credibly reported. How
should anything exist so unlike home, so out of scale with
their affairs, so little watery, and so little human ? Their
philosophers confirm them in that incredulity ; and the
sea-caves hold conclaves of profound thinkers congregated

zz

12 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

to prove that only fog can be real. The dry, their council
decrees, is but a vain abstraction, a mere negative which
human imagination opposes to the moist, of which alone,
since life is moist, there can be positive experience.

As for the stars, these inspired children of the mist have
discovered that they are nothing but postulates of astro
nomy, imagined for a moment to exist, in order that a
beautiful human science may be constructed about them.
Duller people, born in the same fog, may not understand
so transcendental a philosophy, but they spontaneously
frame others of their own, not unlike it in principle. In
the middle of the night, when the starlight best manages
to pierce to the lowest strata of the air, these good people
are asleep ; yet occasionally when they are returning
somewhat disappointed from a party, or when illness or
anxiety or love-hunger keeps them pacing their chamber
or tossing in their beds, by chance they may catch a
glimpse of a star or two twinkling between their curtains.
Idle objects, they say to themselves, like dots upon the
wall-paper. Why should there be stars at all, and why
so many of them ? Certainly they shed a little light and
are pretty ; and they are a convenience sometimes in the
country when there is no moon and no lamp-posts ; and
they are said to be useful in navigation and to enable the
astronomers to calculate sidereal time in addition to solar
time, which is doubtless a great satisfaction to them.
But all this hardly seems to justify such an expense of
matter and energy as is involved in celestial mechanics.
To have so much going on so far away, and for such pro
digious lengths of time, seems rather futile and terrible.
Who knows ? Astrologers used to foretell people's char
acter and destiny by their horoscope ; perhaps they may
turn out to have been more or less right after all, now that
science is coming round to support more and more what
our fathers called superstitions. There may be some
meaning in the stars, a sort of code-language such as
Bacon put into Shakespeare's sonnets, which would prove
to us, if we could only read it, not how insignificant, but
how very important we are in the world, since the very
stars are talking about us.

The safest thing, however, is to agree with the great

ATMOSPHERE 13

idealists, who say there are really no stars at all. Or, if
their philosophy seems insecure — and there are rumours
that even the professors are hedging on the subject — we
can always take refuge in faith, and think of the heavenly
bodies as beautiful new homes in which we are to meet
and work together again when we die ; and as in time we
might grow weary even there, with being every day busier
and busier, there must always be other stars at hand for
us to move to, each happier and busier than the last ;
and since we wish to live and to progress for ever, the
number of habitable planets provided for us has to be
infinite. Certainly faith is far better than science for
explaining everything.

So the embryonic soul reasons in her shell of vapour ;
her huddled philosophy is, as it were, pre-natal, and dis
credits the possibility of ever peeping into a cold outer
world. Yet in time this shell may grow dangerously thin
in places, and a little vague light may filter through.
Strange promptings and premonitions at the same 'time
may visit the imprisoned spirit, as if it might not be im
possible nor inglorious to venture into a world that was
not oneself. At last, willy-nilly, the soul may be actually
hatched, and may suddenly find herself horribly exposed,
cast perhaps on the Arabian desert, or on some high,
scorched, open place that resembles it, like the uplands of
Castile. There the rarefied atmosphere lets the stars down
upon her overwhelmingly, like a veritable host of heaven.
There the barren earth entwines few tentacles about the
heart ; it stretches away dark and empty beneath our
feet, a mere footstool for meditation. It is a thing to look
away from, too indifferent and accidental even to spurn ;
for after all it supports us, and though small and extin
guished it is one of the stars. In these regions the shepherds
first thought of God.

2
GRISAILLE

ENGLAND is pre-eminently a land of atmosphere. A
luminous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances,

14 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

magnifying perspectives, transfiguring familiar objects,
harmonizing the accidental, making beautiful things
magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavement
become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross
world are shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels,
more appealing than precious stones to the poet, because
they are insubstantial and must be loved without being
possessed. Mists prolong the most sentimental and sooth
ing of hours, the twilight, through the long summer
evenings and the whole winter's day. In these country
sides so full of habitations and these towns so full of
verdure, lamplight and twilight cross their rays ; and the
passers-by, mercifully wrapped alike in one crepuscular
mantle, are reduced to unison and simplicity, as if sketched
at one stroke by the hand of a master.

English landscape, if we think only of the land and
the works of man upon it, is seldom on the grand scale.
Charming, clement, and eminently habitable, it is almost
too domestic, as if only home passions and caged souls
could live there. But lift the eyes for a moment above
the line of roofs or of tree-tops, and there the grandeur
you miss on the earth is spread gloriously before you.
The spirit of the atmosphere is not compelled, like the god
of pantheism, to descend in order to exist, and wholly to
diffuse itself amongst earthly objects. It exists absolutely
in its own person as well, and enjoys in the sky, like a true
deity, its separate life and being. There the veil of Maya,
the heavenly Penelope, is being woven and rent perpetually,
and the winds of destiny are always charmingly defeating
their apparent intentions. Here is the playground of
those early nebulous gods that had the bodies of giants
and the minds of children.

In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and
rainbows appears but seldom ; such contrasts are too
violent and definite for these tender skies. Here the
conflict between light and darkness, like all other conflicts,
ends in a compromise ; cataclysms are rare, but revolution
is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified ; all
is luminous and all is grey.

PRAISES OF WATER 15

3
PRAISES OF WATER

THE transformation of landscape by moisture is no matter
of appearance only, no mere optical illusion or effect of
liquid stained glass. It is a sort of echo or symbol to
our senses of very serious events in prehistoric times.
Water, which now seems only to lap the earth or to cloud
it, was the chisel which originally carved its surface.
They say that when the planet, recently thrown off from
the sun, was still on fire, the lighter elements rose in the
form of gases around the molten metallic core ; and the
outer parts of this nucleus in cooling formed a crust of
igneous rock which, as the earth contracted, was crushed
together and wrinkled like the skin of a raisin. These
wrinkles are our mountain chains, made even more rugged
and villainous by belated eruptions. On that early earth
there was no water. All was sheer peaks, ledges, and
chasms, red-hot or coal-black, or of such livid metallic
hues, crimson, saffron, and purple, as may still be seen
on the shores of the Dead Sea or in the Grand Canyon of
the Colorado — rifts that allow us to peep into the infernal
regions, happily in those places at least without inhabitants.
This hellish sort of landscape, which we must now plunge
into the depths to find, was the first general landscape of
earth.

As the cooling progressed, however, the steam that
was in the upper atmosphere began to condense and
to fall in rain. At first the hot drops no doubt sizzled as
they fell and rose again immediately in vapour, yet the
meteorological cycle was established notwithstanding.
The rain that evaporated descended once more, each
time colder and more abundant, until it cut channels
amongst the crags, ground and polished their fragments
into boulders and pebbles, formed pools in the hollows,
and finally covered the earth up to its chin with the
oceans. Much detritus meantime was washed down from
the rocks ; it gathered in crevices and along the pockets
and slacker reaches of rivers. This sediment was soaked

16 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

with moisture and mixed with dissolved acids , it became
the first soft layer of earth and finally a fertile soil. Water
in this way softened the outlines of the mountains, laid the
floor of the valleys, and made a leafy and a cloudy place of
the planet.

The sages (and some of them much more recent than
Thales) tell us that water not only wears away the rocks,
but has a singular power of carrying away their subtler
elements in solution, especially carbonic acid, of which the
atmosphere also is full ; and it happens that these elements
can combine with the volatile elements of water into
innumerable highly complex substances, all of which the
atmospheric cycle carries with it wherever it goes ; and with
these complex substances, which are the requisite materials
for living bodies, it everywhere fills the sea and impregnates
the land.

Even if life, then, is not actually born of the moist
element, it is at least suckled by it ; the water-laden
atmosphere is the wet nurse, if not the mother, of the
earth-soul. The earth has its soul outside its body, as
many a philosopher would have wished to have his. The
winds that play about it are its breath, the water that
rains down and rises again in mist is its circulating blood ;
and the death of the earth will come when some day it
sucks in the atmosphere and the sea, gets its soul inside
its body again, turns its animating gases back into solids,
and becomes altogether a skeleton of stone.

No wonder that living creatures find things that are
fluid and immersed in moisture friendly to the watery core
of their own being. Seeds, blood, and tears are liquid ;
nothing else is so poignant as what passes and flows, like
music and love ; and if this irreparable fluidity is sad,
anything stark and arrested is still sadder. Life is com
pelled to flow, and things must either flow with it or, like
Lot's wife, in the petrified gesture of refusal, remain to
mock their own hope.

THE TWO PARENTS OF VISION 17

4
THE TWO PARENTS OF VISION

IT would seem that when a heavenly body ceases to shine
by its own light, it becomes capable of breeding eyes with
which to profit by the light other bodies are shedding ;
whereas, so long as it was itself on fire, no part of it could
see. Is life a gift which cooling stars receive from those
still incandescent, when some ray falls upon a moist spot,
making it a focus of warmth and luminous energy, and
reversing at that point the general refrigeration ? It is
certain, at any rate, that if light did not pour down from
the sun no earthly animal would have developed an eye.
Yet there was another partner in this business of seeing,
who would have flatly refused to undertake it, had the sole
profit been the possibility of star-gazing.

Star-gazing is an ulterior platonic homage which we pay
to our celestial sources, as a sort of pious acknowledgment
of their munificence in unconsciously begetting us. But
this is an acknowledgment which they are far from demand
ing or noticing, not being vain or anxious to be admired,
like popular gods ; and if we omitted it, they would continue
to perform their offices towards us with the same contemptu
ous regularity. Star-gazing is, therefore, a pure waste of
time in the estimation of the other partner in vision, besides
celestial light — I mean, that clod of moist earth which the
light quickens, that plastic home-keeping parent of the
mind, whom we might call old mother Psyche, and whose
primary care is to keep the body in order and guide it
prudently over the earth's surface. For such a purpose
the direct rays of the sun are blinding, and those of the
moon and stars fit only to breed lunatics. To mother
Psyche it seems a blessing that the view of the infinite from
the earth is so often intercepted ; else it might have sunk
into her heart (for she has watched through many a night
in her long vegetative career), and might have stretched
her comfortable industrious sanity into a sort of divine
madness or reason, very disconcerting in her business.
Indeed, she would never have consented to look or to see
at all, except for this circumstance, that the rays coming

c

i8 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

from heavenly bodies are reflected by earthly bodies upon
one another ; so that by becoming sensitive to light the
Psyche could receive a most useful warning of what to
seek or to avoid. Instead of merely stretching or poking
or sniffing through the world, she could now map it at a
glance, and turn instinct into foresight.

This was a great turn in her career, wonderful in its
tragic possibilities, and something like falling in love ; for
her new art brought her a new pleasure and a new unrest,
purer and more continual than those drowsy and terrible
ones which she knew before. Reflected light is beautiful.
The direct downpour of light through space leaves space
wonderfully dark, and it falls on the earth indiscriminately
upon the wise and the foolish, to warm or to scorch them ;
but the few rays caught by solid matter or drifting vapour
become prismatic, soft, and infinitely varied ; not only
reporting truly the position and material diversity of things,
but adding to them an orchestration in design and colour
bewitching to the senses. It was not the stars but the
terrestrial atmosphere that the eyes of the flesh were made
to see ; even mother Psyche can love the light, when it
clothes or betrays something else that matters ; and the
fleshly-spiritual Goethe said most truly : Am farbigen
A bglanz haben wir das Leben.

5
AVERSION FROM PLATONISM

REPETITION is the only form of permanence that nature
can achieve, and in those Mediterranean regions that
nurtured the classic mind, by continually repeating the
same definite scenes, nature forced it to fix its ideas.
Every one learned to think that the earth and the gods
were more permanent than himself ; he perused them, he
returned to them, he studied them at arm's length, and
he recognized their external divinity. But where the
Atlantic mists envelop everything, though we must
repeatedly use the same names for new-born things, as
we continue to christen children John and Mary, yet we
feel that the facts, like the persons, are never really alike ;

AVERSION FROM PLATONISM 19

everything is so fused, merged, and continuous, that what
ever element we may choose to say is repeated seems but
a mental abstraction and a creature of language. The
weather has got into our bones ; there is a fog in the
brain ; the limits of our own being become uncertain to us.
Yet what is the harm, if only we move and change inwardly
in harmony with the ambient flux ? Why this mania for
naming and measuring and mastering what is carrying us
so merrily along ? Why shouldn't the intellect be vague
while the heart is comfortable ?

6
CLOUD CASTLES

THE heavens are the most constant thing we know, the
skies the most inconstant. Even the Olympian expanse,
when blue and cloudless, is an aspect of terrestrial atmo
sphere in a holiday mood, a sort of gay parasol which the
Earth holds up when she walks in the sun, and takes down
again when she walks in the shadow ; while clouds are veils
wrapped more closely about her, and even more friendly
to her frailty. Nor are these feminine trappings less lovely
for being easily blown about, and always fresh and in the
latest fashion. It is a prejudice to suppose that instability
must be sad or must be trivial. A new cloud castle is
probably well worth an old one ; any one of them may
equal in beauty the monotonous gold and black vault
which it conceals from us, and all of them together certainly
surpass that tragic decoration in spiritual suggestion.
Something in us no doubt regrets that these airy visions
vanish so quickly and are irrecoverable ; but this is a sort
of fleshly sentimentality of ours and not reasonable. In
nature, what disappears never narrows the range of what
is yet to be. If we were immortally young, like the atmo
sphere, the lapse of things would not grieve us, nor would
inconstancy be a vice in ourselves. Nobody's future would
be blighted by his past ; and this perhaps explains the
morals of the gods. Change to us is an omen of death, and N
only in the timeless can we feel secure ; but if we were safe
in our plastic existence, like nature and the gods of nature,

20 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

fidelity to a single love might seem foolish in us ; being
and possessing any one thing would not then be incompatible
with sooner or later being and possessing everything else.
Nature and substance are like the absolute actor with an
equal affinity for every part, and changing sex, age, and
station with perfect good grace.

A great principle of charity in morals is not to blame
the fishes for their bad taste in liking to live under water.
Yet many philosophers seem to have sinned against this
reasonable law, since they have blamed life and nature for
liking to change, which is as much as to say for liking to
live. Certainly life and nature, when they produce thought,
turn from themselves towards the eternal, but it is by a
glance, itself momentary, that they turn to it ; for if they
were themselves converted into something changeless, they
could neither live, think, nor turn. In the realm of existence
it is not sinful to be fugitive nor in bad taste to be new.
Accordingly cloud castles have nothing to blush for ; if
they have a weak hold on existence, so has everything
good. We are warned that the day of judgement will be
full of surprises : perhaps one of them may be that in
heaven things are even more unstable than on earth, and
that the mansions reserved for us there are not only many
but insecure. Cloud castles are hints to us that eternity
has nothing to do with duration, nor beauty with substantial
existence, and that even in heaven our bliss would have
to be founded on a smiling renunciation. Did Mohammed,
I wonder, misunderstand the archangel Gabriel in gathering
that celestial beauties (unlike the lights and voices of
Dante's paradise) could be embraced as well as admired ?
And in promising that our heavenly brides would daily
recover their virginity, did he simply clothe in a congenial
metaphor the fact that they would be different brides every
day, and that if we wished to dwell in a true paradise, and
not in a quarrelsome and sordid harem, we must never
dream of seeing any of them a second time ?

Fidelity is a virtue akin to habit and rooted in the
inertia of animal life, which would run amok without trusty
allies and familiar signals. We have an inveterate love of
The Same, because our mortal condition obliges us to
reconsider facts and to accumulate possessions ; by instinct

CLOUD CASTLES 21

both the heart and the intellect hug everything they touch,
and to let anything go is a sort of death to them. This
spirit of pathetic fidelity in us would certainly reproach
those ethereal visions for being ephemeral, and Cupid for
having wings and no heart ; but might not the visiting
angels in turn reproach us for clownishness in wishing to
detain them ? They are not made of flesh and blood ;
they are not condemned to bear children. Their smile,
their voice, and the joy they bring us are the only life
they have. They are fertile only like the clouds, in that
by dissolving they give place to some other form, no less
lovely and elusive than themselves ; and perhaps if we
took a long view we should not feel that our own passage
through existence had a very different quality. We last
as a strain of music lasts, and we go where it goes. Is it
not enough that matter should illustrate each ideal possi
bility only once and for a moment, and that Caesar or
Shakespeare should figure once in this world ? To repeat
them would not intensify their reality, while it would
impoverish and make ridiculous the pageant of time, like
a stage army running round behind the scenes in order to
reappear. To come to an end is a virtue when one has had
one's day, seeing that in the womb of the infinite there are
always other essences no less deserving of existence.

Even cloud castles, however, have a double lien on
permanence. A flash of lightning is soon over, yet so
long as the earth is wrapped in its present atmosphere,
flashes will recur from time to time so very like this one
that the mind will make the same comment upon them,
and its pronouncements on its past experience will remain
applicable to its experience to come. Fleeting things in
this way, when they are repeated, survive and are united
in the wisdom which they teach us in common. At the
same time they inwardly contain something positively
eternal, since the essences they manifest are immutable
in character, and from their platonic heaven laugh at this
inconstant world, into which they peep for a moment,
when a chance collocation of atoms suggests one or another
of them to our minds. To these essences mind is con
stitutionally addressed, and into them it likes to sink in
its self-forgetfulness. It is only our poor mother Psyche,

22 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

being justly afraid of growing old, who must grudge the
exchange of one vision for another. Material life is sluggish
and conservative ; it would gladly drag the whole weary
length of its past behind it, like a worm afraid of being
cut in two in its crawling. It is haunted by a ghostly
memory, a wonderful but not successful expedient for
calling the dead to life, in order, somewhat inconsistently,
to mourn over them and be comforted. Why not kiss our
successive pleasures good-bye, simply and without marking
our preferences, as we do our children when they file to
bed ? A free mind does not measure the worth of anything
by the worth of anything else. It is itself at least as
plastic as nature and has nothing to fear from revolutions.
To live in the moment would indeed be brutish and
dangerous if we narrowed to a moment the time embraced
in our field of view, since with the wider scope of thought
come serenity and dominion ; but to live in the moment
is the only possible life if we consider the spiritual activity
itself. The most protracted life, in the actual living, can
be nothing but a chain of moments, each the seat of its
irrecoverable vision, each a dramatic perspective of the
world, seen in the light of a particular passion at a
particular juncture. But at each moment the wholeness
of mind is spiritual and aesthetic, the wholeness of a
meaning or a picture, and no knife can divide it. Its
immortality, too, is timeless, like that of the truths and
forms in which it is absorbed. Therefore apprehension
can afford to hasten all the more trippingly in its career,
touching the facts here and there for a moment, and
building its cloud castles out of light and air, movement
and irony, to let them lapse again without a pang. Con
templation, when it frees itself from animal anxiety about
existence, ceases to question and castigate its visions, as
if they were mere signals of alarm or hints of hidden
treasures ; and then it cannot help seeing what treasures
these visions hold within themselves, each framing
some luminous and divine essence, as a telescope frames
a star ; and something of their inalienable distinction
and firmness seems to linger in our minds, though in the
exigencies of our hurried life we must turn away from each
of them and forget them.

CROSS-LIGHTS 23

7
CROSS-LIGHTS

THEY say the sun is a very small star, and the thing is
plausible enough in itself, without the proofs which
presumably the astronomers can give of it. That which
nature produces she is apt to produce in crowds; what
she does once, if she has her way, she will do often, with a
persistency and monotony which would be intolerable to
her if she were endowed with memory ; but hers is a life
of habit and automatic repetition, varied only when there
is some hitch in the clockwork, and she begins hurriedly
beating a new tune. Accordingly, what any creature
calls the present time, the living interest, the ruling power,
or the true religion is almost always but as one leaf in a tree.
The same plastic stress which created it creates a million
comparable things around it. Yet it is easy for each to
ignore its neighbours, and to be shocked at the notion of
loving them as itself ; for they all have their separate
places or seasons, and bloom on their several stems, so
that an accident that overwhelms one of them may easily
leave the others unscathed. But for all that, they are as
multitudinous and similar as the waves of the sea. Take
any star at random, like our sun, or any poet, or any idea,
and whilst certainly it will be the nearest and warmest to
somebody, it is not at all likely to be the greatest of its
kind, or even very remarkable.

Nevertheless, in a moral perspective, nearness makes
all the difference ; and for us the sun is a veritable ruling
deity and parent of light ; he is the centre and monarch
of our home system. Similarly each living being is a sort
of sun to itself ; this spark within me, by whose light I
see at .all, is a great sun to me ; and considering how wide
a berth other spiritual luminaries seem to give me, I must
warm myself chiefly by my own combustion, and remain
singularly important to myself. This importance belongs
to the humour of material existence, visible when I look
at my seamy side ; it vanishes in so far as my little light
actually burns clear, and my intent flies with it to whatever
objects its rays can reach, no matter how distant or alien.

24 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

Yet this very intelligence and scope in me are functions
of my inward fire : seeing, too, is burning. An atomic
and spark-like form of existence, prevalent in nature, is
absolutely essential to spirit ; and I find it very acceptable.
It is a free, happy, and humble condition. I welcome the
minute bulk, the negligible power, the chance quality and
oddity of my being, combined as it is with vital in
dependence and adequate fuel in my small bunkers for
my brief voyage. On a vaster scale, I think the sun, for
all his littleness, has a splendid prerogative, and I honour
Phoebus as a happy god. The happiest part of his condition
and his best claim to deity lie in this : that he can irradiate
and kindle the frozen or vaporous bodies that swim about
him ; he can create the moonlight and the earthlight,
much more powerful than the moonlight. This earthlight,
if we could only get far enough from the earth to see it,
would seem strangely brilliant and beautiful ; it would
show sea-tints and snow-tints and sand-tints ; there would
be greens and purples in it reflected from summer and
winter zones, dotted with cinder scars and smoke-wreaths
of cities. Yet all these lights are only sunlight, received
and returned with thanks.

Nor is this surface shimmer, visible to telescopic
observers, the only benefit gained : something is kept
back and absorbed ; some warmth sinks into the sub
stance of the earth and permeates its watery soil, initiating
currents in the sea and air, and quickening many a nest
of particles into magnetic and explosive and contagious
motions. This life which arises in the earth is an obeisance
to the sun. The flowers turn to the light and the eye
follows it, animal bodies imbibe it, and send it forth again
in glad looks and keen attention ; and when dreams and
thoughts, even with the eyes shut, play within us like
flamelets amongst the coals, it is still the light of the sun,
strangely stored and transmuted, that shines in those
visions. Certainly intelligence in its cognitive intent is
radically immaterial, and nothing could be more hetero
geneous from vibrations, attractions, or ethereal currents
than the power to make assertions that shall be
true or false, relevant or irrelevant to outlying things ;
but this so spiritual power is profoundly natural ; it

CROSS-LIGHTS 25

plainly exhibits an animal awaking to the presence of
other bodies that actually surround him, resenting their
cruelty or wanning to their conquest and absorption.
Apart from its roots in animal predicaments, spirit would
be wholly inexplicable in its moods and arbitrary in its
deliverance. The more ecstatic or the more tragic
experience is, the more unmistakably it is the voice of
matter. It then obviously retraces and makes incan
descent the silent relations of things with things, by which
its weal or woe is decided. Sometimes it simply burns in
their midst and moves in their company like the sun
amongst the stars he ignores ; sometimes it gilds in its
highly coloured lights the surface of things turned in its
direction. Were not the distances between bodies spanned
by some universal gravitation (which we are now told
may be a sort of light), we may be sure that sense and
fancy, which are profoundly vegetative things, would
never leap from their source and discount their images
in the heroic effort to understand the world. But the
fire of life casts its passionate illumination on the dead
things that control it, and raises to aesthetic actuality
various poetic symbols of their power. Dead things possess,
of course, in their own right, their material and logical
being, but they borrow from the adventitious interest
which a living creature must needs take in them their
various moral dignities and all their part in the conscious
world. It is intelligible that moralists and psychologists
should be absorbed in those reflections of their attention
which reach them from things distant or near, and that
they should pronounce the whole universe to be nothing
but their experience of it, a sort of rainbow or crescent
kindly decorating their personal sky. On the same
principle the sun (who, being a material creature, would
also be subject to egotism) might say that the only substance
in the universe was light, and that the earth and moon
were nothing but ethereal mirrors palely reflecting his own
fire. It would seem absurd to him that the earth or its
inhabitants should profess to have any bowels. Inextin
guishable laughter and self-assurance would seize him at
the report that any dark places existed, or any invisible
thoughts. He would never admit that, in all this, he was

26 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

himself thinking ; what we should call his thoughts he
would maintain (without thinking !) were evident meteors
moving and shining on their own account.

Such are the cross-lights of animal persuasion. Things,
when seen, seem to come and go with our visions ; and
visions, when we do not know why they visit us, seem to
be things. But this is not the end of the story. Opacity
is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals the
existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact
live and spread their roots in the darkness, which em
bosoms and creates the light, though the light does not
comprehend it. If sensuous evidence flooded the whole
sphere with which souls are conversant, they would have
no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did
not see, and they would live in a fool's paradise of lucidity.
Fortunately for their wisdom, if not for their comfort,
they come upon mysteries and surprises, earthquakes and
rumblings in their hidden selves and in their undeciphered
environment ; they live in time, which is a double abyss
of darkness ; and the primary and urgent object of their
curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which
from its ambush governs their fortunes. The proud, who
shine by their own light, do not perceive matter, the fuel
that feeds and will some day fail them ; but the knowledge
of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light and
almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm them
selves at a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its
favourable shining. When we are on the shady side of
the earth we can, as a compensation, range in knowledge
far beyond our painted atmosphere, and far beyond that
little sun who, so long as he shone upon us, seemed to ride
at the top of heaven ; we can perceive a galaxy of other
lights, no less original than he, to which his glory blinded
us; we can even discover how he himself, if his hot
head of burning hair would only suffer him to notice it,
lives subject to their perpetual influence. Beautiful and
happy god as Phoebus may be, he is not a just god nor an
everlasting one. He is a lyric singer ; he is not responsible
save to his own heart, and not obliged to know other
things. He lives in the eternal, and does not need to be
perpetual. And he is often beneficent in his spontaneity,

CROSS-LIGHTS 27

and many of us have cause to thank and to love him.
There is an uncovenanted society of spirits, like that of the
morning stars singing together, or of all the larks at once
in the sky ; it is a happy accident of freedom and a con
spiracy of solitudes. When people talk together, they are
at once entangled in a mesh of instrumentalities, irrelevance,
misunderstanding, vanity, and propaganda ; and all to no
purpose, for why should creatures become alike who are
different ? But when minds, being naturally akin and
each alone in its own heaven, soliloquize in harmony, saying
compatible things only because their hearts are similar,
then society is friendship in the spirit ; and the unison of
many thoughts twinkles happily in the night across the
void of separation.

8

HAMLET'S QUESTION
/"

To be born is painful, and the profit of it so uncertain
that we need not wonder if sometimes the mind as well
as the body seems to hold back?) The winds of February
are not colder to a featherless chick than are the surprises
which nature and truth bring to our dreaming egotism.
It was warm and safe in the egg; exciting enough, too,
to feel a new organ throbbing here or a fresh limb growing
out there. No suspicion visited the happy creature that
these budding domestic functions were but preparations
for foreign wars and omens of a disastrous death, to over
take it sooner or later in a barbarous, militant, incompre
hensible world. Of death, and even of birth (its ominous
counterpart) the embryo had no idea. It believed simply
in the tight spherical universe which it knew, and was
confident of living in it for ever. It would have thought
heaven had fallen if its shell had cracked. How should
life be possible in a world of uncertain dimensions, where
incalculable blows might fall upon us at any time from
any quarter ? What a wild philosophy, to invent objects
and dangers of which there was absolutely no experience !
And yet for us now, accustomed to the buffets and ambi
tions of life in the open, that pre-natal vegetative dream

28 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

seems worthless and contemptible, and hardly deserving
the name of existence.

Could we have debated Hamlet's question before we
were conceived, the answer might well have been doubt
ful ; or rather reason, not serving any prior instinct, could
have expressed no preference and must have left the
decision to chance. Birth and death are the right moments
for absolute courage. But when once the die is cast and
we exist, so that Hamlet's question can be put to us, the
answer is already given ; nature in forming us has com
pelled us to prejudge the case. She has decreed that all
the beasts and many a man should propagate without
knowing what they are about ; and the infant soul for its
part, when once begotten, is constitutionally bent on
working out its powers and daring the adventure of life.
To have made the great refusal at the beginning, for fear
of what shocks and hardships might come, seems to us,
now that we are launched, morose and cowardly. Our
soul, with its fluttering hopes and alarmed curiosity, is
made to flee from death, and seems to think, if we judge
by its action, that to miss experience altogether is worse and
sadder than any life, however troubled or short. If nature
has fooled us in this, she doubtless saw no harm in doing
so, and thought it quite compatible with heartily loving
us in her rough way. She merely yielded to a tendency
to tease which is strangely prevalent among nurses. With
a sort of tyrannical fondness, to make us show our paces,
she dangled this exciting and unsatisfactory bauble of life
before us for a moment, only to laugh at us, and kiss us,
and presently lay our head again on her appeasing breast.

The fear which children feel at being left in the dark
or alone or among strangers goes somewhat beyond what
a useful instinct would require ; for they are likely to be
still pretty well embosomed and protected, not to say
smothered. It is as if the happy inmate of some model
gaol took alarm at the opening of his cell door, thinking
he was to be driven out and forced to take his chances
again in this rough wide world, when, in fact, all was well
and he was only being invited to walk in the prison garden.
Just so when the young mind hears the perilous summons
to think, it is usually a false alarm. In its philosophical

CAMLET'S QUESTION 29

excursions it is likely to remain well blanketed from the
truth and comfortably muffled in its own atmosphere.
Groping and empirical in its habits, it will continue in the
path it happens to have turned into ; for in a fog how should
it otherwise choose its direction ? Its natural preference
is to be guided by touch and smell, but it sometimes finds
it convenient to use its eyes and ears as a substitute. So
long as the reference to the vegetative soul and its comforts
remains dominant, this substitution is harmless. Sights
and sounds will then be but flowers in the prisoner's garden,
and intelligence a maze through which at best he will find
his way home again. Some danger there always is, even
in such an outing ; for this walled garden has gates into
the fields, which by chance may be left open. Sight and
sound, in their useful ministrations, may create a new
interest, and run into sheer music and star-gazing. The
life the senses were meant to serve will then be forgotten ;
the psychic atmosphere — which of course is indispensable —
will be pierced, discounted, and used as a pleasant vehicle
to things and to truths ; and the motherly soul, having
unintentionally given birth to the intellect, will grumble
at her runaway and thankless child. As for the truant
himself, Hamlet's question will lapse from his view
altogether, not because nature has answered it for him
beforehand, but because his own disinterestedness and
rapture have robbed it of all urgency. Intellect is
passionate, and natural, and human enough, as singing
is ; it is all the purer and keener for having emancipated
itself, like singing, from its uses, if it ever had any, and
having become a delight in itself. But it is not concerned
with its own organs or their longevity; it cannot under
stand why its mother, the earthly soul, thinks all the good
and evil things that happen in this world are of no conse
quence, if they do not happen to her.

9
THE BRITISH CHARACTER

WHAT is it that governs the Englishman ? Certainly not
intelligence ; seldom passion ; hardly self-interest, since

30 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

what we call self-interest is nothing but some dull passion
served by a brisk intelligence. The Englishman's heart
is perhaps capricious or silent ; it is seldom designing or
mean. There are nations where people are always inno
cently explaining how they have been lying and cheating
in small matters, to get out of some predicament, or secure
some advantage ; that seems to them a part of the art
of living. Such is not the Englishman's way : it is easier
for him to face or to break opposition than to circumvent
it. If we tried to say that what governs him is convention,
we should have to ask ourselves how it comes about that
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity,
heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humours. Nowhere do
we come oftener upon those two social abortions — the
affected and the disaffected. Where else would a man
inform you, with a sort of proud challenge, that he lived
on nuts, or was in correspondence through a medium with
Sir Joshua Reynolds, or had been disgustingly housed when
last in prison ? Where else would a young woman, in
dress and manners the close copy of a man, tell you that
her parents were odious, and that she desired a husband
but no children, or children without a husband ? It is
true that these novelties soon become the conventions
of some narrower circle, or may even have been adopted
en bloc in emotional desperation, as when people are
converted ; and the oddest sects demand the strictest
self-surrender. Nevertheless, when people are dissident
and supercilious by temperament, they manage to wear
their uniforms with a difference, turning them by some
lordly adaptation into a part of their own person.

Let me come to the point boldly ; what governs the
Englishman is his inner atmosphere, the weather in his
soul. It is nothing particularly spiritual or mysterious.
When he has taken his exercise and is drinking his tea or
his beer and lighting his pipe ; when, in his garden or by
his fire, he sprawls in an aggressively comfortable chair ;
when, well-washed and well-brushed, he resolutely turns
in church to the east and recites the Creed (with genu
flexions, if he likes genuflexions) without in the least
implying that he believes one word of it ; when he hears
or sings the most crudely sentimental and thinnest of

THE BRITISH CHARACTER 31

popular songs, unmoved but not disgusted ; when he makes
up his mind who is his best friend or his favourite poet
when he adopts a party or a sweetheart ; when he is
hunting or shooting or boating, or striding through the
fields ; when he is choosing his clothes or his profession —
never is it a precise reason, or purpose, or outer fact that
determines him ; it is always the atmosphere of his inner
man.

To say that this atmosphere was simply a sense of
physical well-being, of coursing blood and a prosperous
digestion, would be far too gross ; for while psychic
weather is all that, it is also a witness to some settled
disposition, some ripening inclination for this or that,
deeply rooted in the soul. It gives a sense of direction
in life which is virtually a code of ethics, and a religion
behind religion. On the other hand, to say it was the
vision of any ideal or allegiance to any principle would
be making it far too articulate and abstract. The inner
atmosphere, when compelled to condense into words,
may precipitate some curt maxim or over-simple theory
as a sort of war-cry ; but its puerile language does it in
justice, because it broods at a much deeper level than
language or even thought. It is a mass of dumb instincts
and allegiances, the love of a certain quality of life, to
be maintained manfully. It is pregnant with many a
stubborn assertion and rejection. It fights under its
trivial fluttering opinions like a smoking battleship under
its flags and signals ; you must consider, not what they
are, but why they have been hoisted and will not be
lowered. One is tempted at times to turn away in despair
from the most delightful acquaintance — the picture of
manliness, grace, simplicity, and honour, apparently rich
in knowledge and humour — because of some enormous
platitude he reverts to, some hopelessly stupid little dogma
from which one knows that nothing can ever liberate
him. The reformer must give him up ; but why
should one wish to reform a person so much better than
oneself ? He is like a thoroughbred horse, satisfying to
the trained eye, docile to the light touch, and coursing in
most wonderful unison with you through the open world.
What do you care what words he uses ? Are you impatient

32 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

with the lark because he sings rather than talks ? and if he
could talk, would you be irritated by his curious opinions ?
Of course, if any one positively asserts what is contrary
to fact, there is an error, though the error may be harm
less ; and most divergencies between men should interest
us rather than offend us, because they are effects of per
spective, or of legitimate diversity in experience and
interests. Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and
is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments
and long beards. Jupiter decided the most intricate
questions with a nod, and a very few words and no gestures
suffice for the Englishman to make his inner mind felt
most unequivocably when occasion requires.

Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no
conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and
home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if
only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers,
and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly
he is most hospitable and accepts almost anj/body for the
time being ; he travels and conquers without a settled
design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His
adventures are all external ; they change him so little
that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English
weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a
cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle
amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the
heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet,
just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human
race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and
fanatics manage to supplant him.

10
SEAFARING

ALL peoples that dwell by the sea sometimes venture out
upon it. The boys are eager to swim and sail, and the
men may be turned into habitual navigators by the spirit
of enterprise or by necessity. But some races take to the
water more kindly than others, either because they love

SEAFARING 33

the waves more or the furrow less. We may imagine that
sheer distress drove the Norse fishermen and pirates into
their open boats. The ocean they explored was rough
and desolate ; the fish and the pillaged foreigner had to
compensate them for their privations. They quitted their
fiords and brackish islands dreaming of happier lands.
But with the Greeks and the English the case was some
what different. There are no happier lands than theirs ;
and they set forth for the most part on summer seas,
towards wilder and less populous regions. They went
armed, of course, and ready to give battle : they had no
scruples about carrying home anything they might purloin
or obtain by enormously advantageous barter, but they
were not in quest of softer climes or foreign models ; their
home remained their ideal. They were scarcely willing to
settle in foreign parts unless they could live their home
life there.

This love of home merged in their minds with the love
of liberty ; it was a loyalty inwardly grounded and not a
mere tribute to habit or external influences. They could
consequently retain their manners wherever they went,
and could found free colonies, almost as Greek or as English
as the mother country ; for it was not Greece that originally
formed the Greeks nor England the English, but the other
way round ; the Greeks and the English, wherever they
might be, spun their institutions about them like a cocoon.
Certainly the geographical environment was favourable ;
the skies and waters that embosomed them — when in their
migrations they had reached those climes — simply met
their native genius half-way and allowed it to bloom as it
had not elsewhere. But the winds could carry that same
seed to fructify in other soils ; and as there were many
Greek cities sprung from one, so there are several local
Englands in Great Britain, and others all over the world.
Even people who are not heirs of these nations according
to the flesh may assimilate their spirit in some measure.
All men are Greek in the best sense in so far as they are
rational, and live and think on the human scale ; and all
are English in so far as their souls are individual, each the
imperturbably dominant cell in its own organism, each
faithful to its inner oracle.

34 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

Life at sea is very favourable to this empire of personal
liberty. The inner man, the hereditary Psyche that breeds
the body and its discursive thoughts, craves to exercise
ascendancy ; it is essentially a formative principle, an
organ of government. Mere solitude and monastic reverie,
such as a hermit or satirist may enjoy even in great cities,
weary and oppress the Englishman. He wants to do some
thing or else to play at something. His thoughts are not
vivid and substantial enough for company ; his passions
are too nebulous to define their innate objects, until
accident offers something that perhaps may serve. At sea
there is always something doing : you must mind the helm,
the sails, or the engines ; you must keep things ship-shape ;
brasses must be always bright and eyes sharp ; decorum is
essential, since discipline is so ; you may even dress for
dinner and read prayers on Sunday. This routine does not
trespass on the liberty and reserve of your inner man.
You can exchange a few hearty commonplaces with the
other officers and sailors, or even with a casual passenger ;
now and then you may indulge in a long talk, pacing the
deck beneath the stars. There is space, there is the constant
shadow of danger, the chance of some adventure at sea or
on a strange shore. There is a continual test and tension
of character. There are degrees of authority and of
competence, but the sailor's art is finite ; his ship, however
complicated and delicate a creature, has a known structure
and known organs ; she will not do anything without a
reason ; she is not too wayward (as is the course of things
on terra firma) for a clear-headed man to understand nor
for a firm hand to steer. Maritime fortune in its uncertainty
has after all not many forms of caprice ; its worst tricks
are familiar ; your life-belt is hanging over your bunk, and
you are ready.

Every one grumbles at his lot and at his profession ; but
what is man that he should ask for more ? These buffeting
winds, these long hours of deep breathing, these habits of
quick decision and sharp movement whet your appetite ;
you relish your solid plain food, whilst your accustomed
drink smooths over the petty worries of the day, and
liberates your private musings ; and what a companionable
thing your pipe is ! The women — dear, dogmatic, fussy

SEAFARING 35

angels — are not here ; that is a relief ; and yet you are
counting the weeks before you can return to them at home.
And all those tender episodes of a more fugitive sort, how
merrily you think them over now ! more merrily perhaps
than you enacted them, since you need not call to mind
the little shabby accompaniments and false notes that may
have marred them in reality. Your remoter future, too,
is smiling enough for an honest man who believes in God
and is not a snob in the things of the spirit. You see in
your mind's eye a cottage on some sunny hillside over
looking the sea ; near it, from a signal-post that is a ship's
mast, the flags are flapping in the breeze ; your children
are playing on the beach — except the eldest, perhaps,
already a sailor. There is a blessed simplicity about the
sea, with its vast inhumanity islanding and freeing the
humanity of man.

ii
PRIVACY

THE secret of English mastery is self-mastery. The English
man establishes a sort of satisfaction and equilibrium in his
inner man, and from that citadel of lightness he easily
measures the value of everything that comes within his
moral horizon. In what may lie beyond he takes but a
feeble interest. Enterprising enough when in a roving
mood, and fond of collecting outlandish objects and ideas,
he seldom allows his wanderings and discoveries to unhinge
his home loyalties or ruffle his self - possession ; and he
remains, after all his adventures, intellectually as indolent
and secure as in the beginning. As to speculative truth,
he instinctively halts short of it, as it looms in the distance
and threatens to cast a contemptuous and chilling shadow
across his life. He would be very severe to a boy who
dreaded cold water and wouldn't learn to swim ; yet in
the moral world he is himself subject to illusions of timidity.
He does not believe, there, in the overwhelming rewards of
courage. His chosen life is indeed beautiful — as the shy
boy's might be — in its fmitude ; all the more beautiful and
worth preserving because, like his country, it is an island

36 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

in the sea. His domestic thermometer and barometer have
sufficed to guide him to the right hygiene.

Hygiene does not require telescopes nor microscopes. It
is not concerned, like medicine or psychology, with the
profound hidden workings of our bodies or minds, com
plexities hardly less foreign to our discoursing selves than
are the mysteries of the great outer world. Hygiene regards
only the right regimen of man in his obvious environment,
judged by his conscious well-being. If it goes afield at all,
it does so in the interests of privacy. All it asks of life is
that it should be comely, spontaneous, and unimpeded :
all it asks of the earth is that it should be fit for sport and
for habitation. Men, to be of the right hygienic sort, must
love the earth, and must know how to range in it. This
the Englishman knows ; and just as, in spite of his
insularity, he loves this whole terraqueous globe simply
and genuinely, so the earth, turned into mud by the vain
stampings of so many garrulous and sickly nations, would
doubtless say : Let the Englishman inhabit me, and I
shall be green again.

In matters of hygiene the Englishman's maxims are
definite and his practice refined. He has discovered what
he calls good form, and is obstinately conservative about
it, not from inertia, but in the interests of pure vitality.
Experience has taught him the uses to which vitality can
be put, so as to preserve and refresh it. He knows the
right degree of exertion normally required to do things
well — to walk or to talk, for instance ; he does not saunter
nor scramble, he does not gesticulate nor scream. In
consequence, perhaps, on extraordinary occasions he fails
at first to exert himself enough ; and his eloquence is not
torrential nor inspired, even at those rare moments when
it ought to be so. But when nothing presses, he shows
abundant energy, without flurry or excess. In manners
and morals, too, he has found the right mean between
anarchy and servitude, and the wholesome measure of
comfort. What those who dislike him call his hypocrisy is
but timeliness in his instincts, and a certain modesty on
their part in not intruding upon one another. Your
prayers are not necessarily insincere because you pray only
in church ; you are not concealing a passion if for a time

PRIVACY 37

you forget it and slough it off. These alternations are
phases of the inner man, not masks put on in turn by
some insidious and calculating knave. All the English
man's attitudes and habits — his out-of-door life, his clubs,
his conventicles, his business — when they are spontaneous
and truly British, are for the sake of his inner man in its
privacy. Other people, unless the game calls for them,
are in the way, and uninteresting. His spirit is like Words
worth's skylark, true to the kindred points of heaven and
home ; and perhaps these points seem to him kindred only
because they are both functions of himself. Home is the
centre of his physical and moral comfort, his headquarters
in the war of life, where lie his spiritual stores. Heaven
is a realm of friendly inspiring breezes and setting suns,
enveloping his rambles and his perplexities. The world
to him is a theatre for the soliloquy of action. There is a
comfortable luxuriousness in all his attitudes. He thinks
the prize of life worth winning, but not worth snatching.
If you snatch it, as Germans, Jews, and Americans seem
inclined to do, you abdicate the sovereignty of your inner
man, you miss delight, dignity, and peace ; and in that
case the prize of life has escaped you.

As the Englishman disdains to peer and is slow to
speculate, so he resents any meddling or intrusion into his
own preserves. How sedulously he plants out his garden,
however tiny, from his neighbours and from the public
road ! If his windows look unmistakably on the street,
at least he fills his window-boxes with the semblance of a
hedge or a garden, and scarcely allows the dubious light to
filter through his blinds and lace curtains ; and the space
between them, in the most dingy tenement, is blocked by
an artificial plant. He is quite willing not to be able to
look out, if only he can prevent other people from looking
in. If they did, what would they see ? Nothing shocking,
surely ; his attitude by his fireside is perfectly seemly.
He is not throwing anything at the family ; very likely
they are not at home. Nor has he introduced any low-class
person by the tradesman's entrance, in whose company he
might blush to be spied. He is not in deshabille ; if he has
changed any part of his street clothes it has not been from
any inclination to be slovenly in private, but on the contrary

38 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

to vindicate his self-respect and domestic decorum. He
does not dress to be seen of men, but of God. His elegance
is an expression of comfort, and his comfort a consciousness
of elegance. The eyes of men disquiet him, eminently
presentable though he be, and he thinks it rude of them to
stare, even in simple admiration. It takes tact and patience
in strangers — perhaps at first an ostentatious indifference
— to reassure him and persuade him that he would be safe
in liking them. His frigid exterior is often a cuticle to
protect his natural tenderness, which he forces himself not
to express, lest it should seem misplaced or clumsy. There
is a masculine sort of tenderness which is not fondness, but
craving and premonition of things untried ; and the young
Englishman is full of it. His heart is quiet and full ; he
has not pumped it dry, like ill-bred children, in tantrums
and effusive fancies. On the other hand, passions are
atrophied if their expression is long suppressed, and we
soon have nothing to say if we never say anything. As he
grows old the Englishman may come to suspect, not without
reason, that he might not reward too close a perusal. His
social bristles will then protect his intellectual weakness,
and he will puff himself out to disguise his vacuity.

It is intelligible that a man of deep but inarticulate
character should feel more at ease in the fields and woods,
at sea or in remote enterprises, than in the press of men.
In the world he is obliged to maintain stiffly principles
which he would prefer should be taken for granted. There
fore when he sits in silence behind his window curtains,
with his newspaper, his wife, or his dog, his monumental
passivity is not a real indolence. He is busily reinforcing
his character, ruffled by the day's contact with hostile or
indifferent things, and he is gathering new strength for the
fray. After the concessions imposed upon him by necessity
or courtesy, he is recovering his natural tone. To-morrow
he will issue forth fresh and confident, and exactly the
same as he was yesterday. His character is like his
climate, gentle and passing readily from dull to glorious,
and back again ; variable on the surface, yet perpetually
self -restored and invincibly the same.

THE LION AND THE UNICORN 39

12

THE LION AND THE UNICORN

EVERY one can see why the Lion should be a symbol for
the British nation. This noble animal loves dignified
repose. He haunts by preference solitary glades and
pastoral landscapes. His movements are slow, he yawns
a good deal ; he has small squinting eyes high up in his
head, a long displeased nose, and a prodigious maw. He
apparently has some difficulty in making things out at a
distance, as if he had forgotten his spectacles (for he is
getting to be an elderly lion now), but he snaps at the
flies when they bother him too much. On the whole, he
is a tame lion ; he has a cage called the Constitution, and a
whole parliament of keepers with high wages and a cockney
accent ; and he submits to all the rules they make for him,
growling only when he is short of raw beef. The younger
members of the nobility and gentry may ride on his back,
and he obligingly lets his tail hang out of the bars, so that
the little Americans and the little Irishmen and the little
Bolshevists, when they come to jeer at him, may twist it.
Yet when the old fellow goes for a walk, how all the
domestic and foreign poultry scamper ! They know he
can spring ; his strength when aroused proves altogether
surprising and unaccountable, he never seems to mind a
blow, and his courage is terrible. The cattle, seeing there
is no safety in flight, herd together when he appears on the
horizon, and try to look unconscious ; the hyenas go to
snarl at a distance ; the eagles and the serpents aver
afterwards that they were asleep. Even the insects that
buzz about his ears, and the very vermin in his skin,
know him for the king of beasts.

But why should the other supporter of the British
arms be the Unicorn ? What are the mystic implica
tions of having a single horn ? This can hardly be the
monster spoken of in Scripture, into the reason for whose
existence, whether he be the rhinoceros of natural history
or a slip of an inspired pen, it would be blasphemy to
inquire. This Unicorn is a creature of mediaeval fancy,
a horse rampant argent, only with something queer about

40 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

his head, as if a croquet-stake had been driven into it, or
he wore a very high and attenuated fool's cap. It would
be far-fetched to see in this ornament any allusion to
deceived husbands, as if in England the alleged injury
never seemed worth two horns, or divorce and damages
soon removed one of them. More plausible is the view
that, as the Lion obviously expresses the British char
acter, so the Unicorn somewhat more subtly expresses the
British intellect. Whereas most truths have two faces,
and at least half of any solid fact escapes any single view
of it, the English mind is monocular ; the odd and the
singular have a special charm for it. This love of the
particular and the original leads the Englishman far
afield in the search for it ; he collects curios, and taking
all the nation together, there is perhaps nothing that
some Englishman has not seen, thought, or known ; but
who sees things as a whole, or anything in its right place ?
He inevitably rides some hobby. He travels through the
wide world with one eye shut, hops all over it on one leg,
and plays all his scales with one ringer. There is fervour,
there is accuracy, there is kindness in his gaze, but there
is no comprehension. He will defend the silliest opinion
with a mint of learning, and espouse the worst of causes
on the highest principles. It is notorious elsewhere that
the world is round, that nature has bulk, and three if not
four dimensions ; it is a truism that things cannot be
seen as a whole except in imagination. But imagination,
if he has it, the Englishman is too scrupulous to trust ;
he observes the shapes and the colours of things intently,
and behold, they are quite flat, and he challenges you to
show why, when every visible part of everything is flat,
anything should be supposed to be round. He is a keen re
former, and certainly the world would be much simpler, right
opinion would be much righter and wrong opinion much
wronger, if things had no third and no fourth dimension.

Ah, why did those early phrenologists, true and typical
Englishmen as they were, denounce the innocent midwife
who by a little timely pressure on the infant skull com
pressed, as they said, " the oval of genius into the flatness
of boobyism " ? Let us not be cowed by a malicious
epithet. What some people choose to call boobyism and

THE LION AND THE UNICORN 41

flatness may be the simplest, the most British, the most
scientific philosophy. Your true booby may be only he
who, having perforce but a flat view of a flat world, prates
of genius and rotundity. Blessed are they whose eye is
single. Only when very drunk do we acknowledge our
double optics ; when sober we endeavour to correct and
ignore this visual duplicity and to see as respectably as if
we had only one eye. The Unicorn might well say the
same thing of two -horned beasts. Such double and
crooked weapons are wasteful and absurd. You can use
only one horn effectively even if you have two, but in a
sidelong and cross-eyed fashion ; else your prey simply
nestles between, where eye cannot see it nor horn probe it.
A single straight horn, on the contrary, is like a lancet ;
it pierces to the heart of the enemy by a sure frontal
attack : nothing like it for pricking a bubble, or pointing
to a fact and scathingly asking the Government if they are
aware of it. In music likewise every pure melody passes
from single note to note, as do the sweet songs of nature.
Away with your demoniac orchestras, and your mad
pianist, tossing his mane, and banging with his ten fingers
and his two feet at once ! As to walking on two feet,
that also is mere wobbling and, as Schopenhauer observed,
a fall perpetually arrested. It is an unstable compromise
between going on all fours, if you want to be safe, and
standing on one leg, like the exquisite flamingo, if you
aspire to be graceful and spiritually sensitive. There is
really no biped in nature except ridiculous man, as if the
prancing Unicorn had succeeded in always being rampant ;
your feathered creatures are bipeds only on occasion
and in their off moments ; essentially they are winged
beings, and their legs serve only to prop them when at
rest, like the foot-piece of a motor-cycle which you let
down when it stops.

The Lion is an actual beast, the Unicorn a chimera ;
and is not England in fact always buoyed up on one
side by some chimera, as on the other by a sense for fact ?
Illusions are mighty, and must be reckoned with in this
world ; but it is not necessary to share them or even
to understand them from within, because being illusions
they do not prophesy the probable consequences of their

42 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

existence ; they are irrelevant in aspect to what they in
volve in effect. The dove of peace brings new wars, the
religion of love instigates crusades and lights faggots,
metaphysical idealism in practice is the worship of
Mammon, government by the people establishes the boss,
free trade creates monopolies, fondness smothers its pet,
assurance precipitates disaster, fury ends in smoke and in
shaking hands. The shaggy Lion is dimly aware of all
this ; he is ponderous and taciturn by an instinctive
philosophy. Why should he be troubled about the dreams
of the Unicorn, more than about those of the nightingale
or the spider ? He can roughly discount these creatures'
habits, in so far as they touch him at all, without decipher
ing their fantastic minds. That makes the strength of
England in the world, the leonine fortitude that helps her,
through a thousand stupidities and blunders, always to
pull through. But England is also, more than any other
country, the land of poetry and of the inner man. Her
sunlight and mists, her fields, cliffs, and moors are full of
aerial enchantment ; it is a land of tenderness and dreams.
The whole nation hugs its hallowed shams ; there is a
real happiness, a sense of safety, in agreeing not to acknow
ledge the obvious ; there is a universal conspiracy of respect
for the non-existent. English religion, English philosophy,
English law, English domesticity could not get on without
this " tendency to feign." And see how admissible, how
almost natural this chimera is. A milk-white pony,
elegantly Arabian, with a mane like sea-foam, and a tail
like a little silvery comet, sensitive nostrils, eyes alight
with recognition, a steed such as Phoebus might well water
at those springs that lie in the chalices of flowers, a symbol
at once of impetuosity and obedience, a heraldic image
for the daintiness of Ariel and the purity of Galahad.
If somehow we suspect that the poetical creature is light-
witted, the stern Lion opposite finds him nevertheless a
sprightly and tender companion, as King Lear did his
exquisite Fool. Such a Pegasus cannot be a normal
horse ; he was hatched in a cloud, and at his birth some
inexorable ironic deity drove a croquet - stake into his
pate, and set an attenuated crown, very like a fool's cap,
between his startled ears.

DONS 43

13
DONS

DONS are picturesque figures. Their fussy ways and their
oddities, personal and intellectual, are as becoming to them
as black feathers to the blackbird. Their minds are all
gaunt pinnacles, closed gates, and little hidden gardens.
A mediaeval tradition survives in their notion of learning
and in their manner of life ; they are monks flown from the
dovecot, scholastics carrying their punctilious habits into
the family circle. In the grander ones there may be
some assimilation to a prelate, a country gentleman, or a
party leader ; but the rank and file are modest, industrious
pedagogues, sticklers for routine, with a squinting know
ledge of old books and of young men. Their politics are
narrow and their religion dubious. There was always
something slippery in the orthodoxy of scholastics, even
in the Middle Ages ; they are so eager to define, to correct,
and to trace back everything, that they tend to cut the
cloth on their own bias, and to make some crotchet of theirs
the fulcrum of the universe. The thoughts of these men
are like the Sibylline leaves, profound but lost. I should
not call them pedants, because what they pursue and insist
on in little things is the shadow of something great ; trifles,
as Michael Angelo said, make perfection, and perfection
is no trifle. Yet dry learning and much chewing of the
cud take the place amongst them of the two ways men have
of really understanding the world — science, which explores
it, and sound wit, which estimates humanly the value of
science and of everything else.

The function of dons is to expound a few classic docu
ments, and to hand down as large and as pleasant a store
as possible of academic habits, maxims, and anecdotes.
They peruse with distrust the new books published on the
subject of their teaching ; they refer to them sometimes
sarcastically, but their teaching remains the same. Their
conversation with outsiders is painfully amiable for a
while ; lassitude soon puts the damper on it, unless they
can lapse into the academic question of the day, or take
up the circle of their good old stories. Their originality

44 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

runs to interpreting some old text afresh, wearing some
odd garment, or frequenting in the holidays some un
frequented spot. When they are bachelors, as properly
they should be, their pupils are their chief link with the
world of affection, with mischievous and merry things ;
and in exchange for this whiff of life, which they receive
with each yearly invasion of flowering youth, like the fresh
scent of hay every summer from the meadows, they furnish
those empty minds with some humorous memories, and
some shreds of knowledge. It does not matter very much
whether what a don says is right or wrong, provided it
is quotable ; nobody considers his opinions for the matter
they convey ; the point is that by hearing them the pupils
and the public may discover what opinions, and on what
subjects, it is possible for mortals to devise. Their maxims
are like those of the early Greek philosophers, a proper
introduction to the good society of the intellectual world.
So are the general systems to which the dons may be
addicted, probably some revision of Christian theology,
of Platonic mysticism, or of German philosophy. Such
foreign doctrines do very well for the dons of successive
epochs, native British philosophy not being fitted to edify
the minds of the young : those vaster constructions appeal
more to the imagination, and their very artificiality and
ticklish architecture, like that of a house of cards, are part
of their function, calling for paradoxical faith and — what
youth loves quite as much — for captious and sophistical
argument. They lie in the fourth dimension of human
belief, amongst the epicycles which ingenious error
describes about the unknown orbit of truth ; for the
truth is not itself luminous, as wit is ; the truth travels
silently in the night and requires to be caught by the
searchlight of wit to become visible. Meantime the mind
plays innocently with its own phosphorescence, which is
what we call culture and what dons are created to keep
alive. Wit the dons often have, of an oblique kind, in
the midst of their much-indulged prejudices and foibles ;
and what with glints of wit and scraps of learning, the
soul is not sent away empty from their door : better fed
and healthier, indeed, for these rich crumbs from the
banquet of antiquity, when thought was fresh, than if

DONS 45

it had been reared on a stuffy diet of useful knowledge,
or on some single dogmatic system, to which life-slavery
is attached. Poor, brusque, comic, venerable dons ! You
watched over us tenderly once, whilst you blew your long
noses at us and scolded ; then we thought only of the
roses in your garden, of your succulent dinners, or perhaps
of your daughters ; but now we understand that you had
hearts yourselves, that you were song-birds grown old in
your cages, having preferred fidelity to adventure. We
catch again the sweet inflection of your cracked notes, and
we bless you. You have washed your hands among the
innocent ; you have loved the beauty of the Lord's house.

14
APOLOGY FOR SNOBS

BRITISH satirists are very scornful of snobbery ; they seem
oppressed by the thought that wealth, rank, and finery
are hideously inane and that they are hideously powerful.
Are these moralists really overcome by a sense of the
. vanity of human wishes ? It would hardly seem so ; for
they often breathe a sentimental adoration for romantic
love or philanthropy or adventure or mystic piety or good
cheer or ruthless will — all of them passions as little likely
as any snobbish impulse to arise without some illusion or
to end without some disappointment. Why this exclusive
hostility to the vanities 'dear to the snob ? Have birth,
money, and fashion no value whatever ? Do they not
dazzle the innocent and unsophisticated with a distant
image of happiness ? Are they not actually, when enjoyed,
very comforting and delightful things in their way ?
What else than this sensitiveness to better social example
— which we may call snobbery if we please — lends English
life in particular its most characteristic excellences — order
without constraint, leisure without apathy, seclusion with
out solitude, good manners without punctilio, emulation
without intrigue, splendour without hollowness ? Why
such bitterness about the harmless absurdities that may
fringe this national discipline ? Are these moralists in

46 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

fact only envious and sulky ? Is it sour grapes ? It
would sometimes seem as if, in England, the less represent
ative a man was the more eagerly he took to literature, and
thought that by hating his fellow-men and despising their
prevalent feelings he rendered himself eminently fit to be
their guide and redeemer.

/ In fact, there is a philosophical principle implied in
snobbery, a principle which is certainly false if made
absolute, but which fairly expresses the moral relations
of things in a certain perspective. If we all really stood
on different steps in a single ladder of progress, then to
admire and imitate those above us and to identify our
selves with them by hook or by crook would be simply to
accelerate our natural development, to expand into our
higher self, and to avoid fatal abysses to the right and to
the left of the path marked out for us by our innate voca
tion. Life would then be like the simple game which
children call Follow the Leader ; and this scrupulous
discipleship would be perfect freedom, since the soul of
our leader and our own soul that chooses him would be
the same. This principle is precisely that of the tran
scendental philosophy where it maintains that there is but
one spirit in all men, and one logical moral evolution for
the world. In fact, it is the Germans rather than the
English that are solemn, convinced, and universal snobs.
If they do not seem so much snobs in particular, it is because
they are snobs uberhaupt. It is not only from the nobility
that grateful dews descend on their sensitive hearts, as
upon open flowers ; they yearn also after the professors
and the artists, and assiduously dress their domestic mind,
so far as the cloth will go, in the latest intellectual fashion.
Their respect for what holds the official stage, and holds
it for the moment, is beautiful in its completeness. They
can change their front without changing their formation.
And the occasional pricks and heartburnings of snobbery
are entirely drowned, in their case, in its voluminous

rious joys.

On the whole, however, snobbish sentiment and tran
scendental philosophy do not express the facts of nature.
Men and nations do not really march in single file, as if
they were being shepherded into some Noah's Ark. They

APOLOGY FOR SNOBS 47

have perhaps a common root and similar beginnings, but
they branch out at every step into forms of life between
which there is no further interchange of sap, and no
common destiny. Their several fruits become incom
mensurable in beauty and in value, like the poetry of
different languages, and more disparate the more each is
perfected after its kind. The whale is not a first sketch
for the butterfly, nor its culmination ; the mind of an ox
is not a fuller expression of that of a rabbit. The poet does
not evolve into the general, nor vice versa ; nor does a
man, in growing further, become a woman, superior as she
may be in her own way. That is why snobbery is really
a vice : it tempts us to neglect and despise our proper
virtues in aping those of other people. If an angel appeared
to me displaying his iridescent wings and treble voice and
heart fluttering with eternal love, I should say, " Certainly,
I congratulate you, but I do not wish to resemble you."
Snobbery haunts those who are not reconciled with them
selves ; evolution is the hope of the immature. You cannot
be everything. Why not be what you are ? /

This contentment with oneself, in its rational mixture
of pride with humility, and its infinite indifference to
possibilities which to us are impossible, is well understood
in the great East — which is a moral as well as a geo
graphical climate. There every one feels that circumstances
have not made and cannot unmake the soul. Variations
of fortune do not move a man from his inborn centre of
gravity. Whatever happens and whatever people say he
puts up with as he would with bad weather. He lets them
thunder and rage, and continues to sit on his heels in his
corner, in the shade or in the sun according to the season,
munching his crust of bread, meditating on heaven and
earth, and publishing on occasion to the passers-by, or to
the wilderness, the revelations he receives from the spirit ;
and if these are particularly vivid, he will not hesitate to
cry, " So saith the Lord," with an equal dignity or assurance
whether he be sage, king, or beggar. Such firmness and
independence of character are admirable, so long as the
expression of them remains merely poetical or moral.
It is enough if confessions are sincere, and aspirations
true to the heart that utters them. In the heights and the

48 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

depths we are all solitary, and we are deceived if we think
otherwise, even when people say they agree with us, or
form a sect under our name. As our radical bodily func
tions are incorrigibly selfish and persistent, so our ultimate
ideals, if they are sincere, must for ever deviate from those
of others and find their zenith in a different star. The
moral world is round like the heavens, and the direc
tions which life can take are infinitely divergent and
unreturning.

But in the world of circumstances, in matters of politics
and business, information, and thrift, civilized men move
together : their interests, if not identical, are parallel,
and their very conflicts and rivalries arise out of this
contact and relevance in their aims. Eminence in this
worldly sphere is unmistakable. One fortune in money
can be measured against another and may be increased
to equal it ; and in government, fashion, and notoriety
some people are unmistakably at the top of the tree, and
doubtless deserve to be there, having found the right
method of climbing. It is only natural that those who
wish to climb too should study and imitate them. Awe
and respect for such persons is an honest expression of
social idealism : it is an admiration mixed with curiosity
and with the desire for propinquity, because their achieve
ments are in our own line of business and a prospective
partnership is not out of the question. Their life is the
ideal of ours. Yet all such conventional values and
instrumentalities, in which we are perhaps absorbed, in
the end say nothing to the heart. If by chance, in the
shifts of this world, we pop up near the people whom we
distantly admired, and reach the crest of the wave in their
company, we discover how great an illusion it was that it
would be good or possible for us to resemble them ; con
ventional friends, we have no instincts, joys, or memories
in common. It is, perhaps, from quite another age or
race, from an utterly different setting of worldly tasks and
ambitions, that some hint of true friendship and under
standing reaches us in our hermitage ; and even this hint
is probably a hollow reverberation of our own soliloquy.
In this slippery competitive earth snobbery is not un
reasonable ; but in heaven and hell there are no snobs.

APOLOGY FOR SNOBS 49

There every despised demon hugs his favourite vice for
ever, and even the smallest of the stars shines with a
singular glory.

15
THE HIGHER SNOBBERY

To call an attitude snobbish, when the great and good
recommend it as the only right attitude, would be to
condemn it without trial ; yet I do not know how else to
name the sentiment that happiness of one sort^ is better
than happiness of another sort, and that perfection in
one animal is more admirable than perfection in another.
I wish there was a word for this arrangement of excellences
in higher and lower classes which did not imply approval
or disapproval of such an arrangement. But language is
terribly moralistic, and I do not blame the logicians for
wishing to invent another which shall convey nothing
to the mind with which it has any previous acquaintance.
The Psyche, who is the mother of language as well as of
intellect, feels things to be good or evil before she notices
what other qualities they may have : and she never gets
much beyond the first dichotomy of her feminine logic :
wretch and darling, nasty and nice. This is perhaps the
true reason why Plato, who in some respects had a feminine
mind and whose metaphysics follows the lines of language,
tells us in one place that the good is the highest of the
Ideas, and the source of both essence and existence.
Good and bad are certainly the first qualities fixed by
words : so that to call a man a snob, for instance, is a very
vague description but a very clear insult. Suppose we found
on examination that the person in question had a retiring
and discriminating disposition, that he shunned the un
washed, that he resembled persons of distinction, and
recognized the superiority of those who were really his
superiors ; we should conclude without hesitation that he
was no snob at all, but a respectable, right-minded person.
If he had been really a snob, he would have looked up
stupidly to what has no true sublimity, like birth without
money, would have imitated what was not becoming to

E

50 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

his station, and would have shunned company, such as our
own, which though perhaps not the most fashionable is
undoubtedly the best. As I can see no scientific difference
between this snob and that no-snob, I am constrained in
my own thoughts to class them together ; but in order
to remind myself that the same principle may be approved
in one case and condemned in the other, I call snobbery,
when people approve of it, the higher snobbery.

An interesting advocate of the higher snobbery is
Nietzsche. Although his admiring eye is fixed on the
superman, who is to supersede our common or garden
humanity, the unique excellence of that future being
does not seem to lie merely in that he is future, or is
destined to be dominant in his day : after all, everything
was once future, everything was once the coming thing,
and destined to prevail in its day. It is only human to
admire and copy the fashion of to-day, whether in clothes,
or politics, or literature, or speculation ; but I have not
yet heard of any snob so far ahead of his times as to love
the fashions of doomsday. The worship of evolution,
which counts for so much with many higher snobs, does not
seem essential in Nietzsche. The superman no doubt is
coming, but he is not coming to stay, since the world
repeats its evolution in perpetual cycles ; and whilst he
will give its highest expression to the love of power, it
does not appear that he will care very much about control
ling external things, or will be able to control them. His
superiority is to be intrinsic, and chiefly composed of
freedom. It was freedom, I think, that Nietzsche sighed
for in his heart, whilst in his cavalierly speculations he
talked of power. At least, unless by power he meant power
to be oneself, the notion that all nature was animated by
the lust of power would lose its plausibility ; the ambition
which we may poetically attribute to all animals is rather
to appropriate such things as serve their use, perfection, or
fancy, and to leave all else alone. There are indications
that the superman was to be a mystic and a wanderer,
like a god visiting the earth, and that what spell he
exercised was to flow from him almost unawares, whilst he
mused about himself and about higher things. So little
was his power to involve subjection to what he worked

THE HIGHER SNOBBERY 51

upon (which is the counterpart of all material power) that
he was to disregard the interests of others in a Spartan
mood ; he was to ride ruthlessly through this nether world,
half a poet, half a scourge, with his breast uncovered to
every treacherous shaft, and his head high in the air.

Now I will not say whether such a romantic and Byronic
life is worth living in itself ; there may be creatures whose
only happiness is to be like that, although I suspect that
Byron and Nietzsche, Lohengrin and Zarathustra, had not
mastered the art of Socrates, and did not know what they
wanted. In any case, such a Dionysiac career would be
good only as the humblest human existence may be so ;
its excellence would lie in its harmony with the nature
of him who follows it, not in its bombast, inflation, or
superhumanity. Nietzsche was far from ungenerous or
unsympathetic towards the people. He wished them
(somewhat contemptuously) to be happy, whilst he and his
superman remained poetically wretched ; he even said
sometimes that in their own sphere they might be perfect,
and added — with that sincerity which, in him, redeems so
many follies — that nothing could be better than such
perfection. But if this admission is to be taken seriously,
the superman would be no better than the good slave.
The whole principle of the higher snobbery would be
abandoned, and Nietzsche in the end would only lead us
back to Epictetus.

No, the higher snob will reply, the perfect superman
may be no better than the perfect slave, but he is higher.
What does this word mean ? For the zealous evolutionist
it seems to mean later, more complicated, requiring a
longer incubation and a more special environment. There
fore what is higher is more expensive, and has a more
precarious existence than what is lower ; so the lady is
higher than the woman, fine art is higher than useful art,
and the height of the fashion in fine art is the highest
point in it. The higher is the more inclusive, requiring
everything else to produce it, and itself producing nothing,
or something higher still. Of course the higher is not
merely the better ; because the standard of excellence
itself changes as we proceed, and according to the standard
of the lower morality the higher state which abolishes it

52 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

will be worse. An orchid may not be more beautiful than
a lily, but it is higher ; philosophy may not be truer than
science, nor true at all, but it is higher, because so much
more comprehensive ; faith may not be more trustworthy
than reason, but it is higher ; insatiable will may not be
more beneficent than contentment in oneself and respect
for others, but it is higher ; war is higher, though more
painful, than peace ; perpetual motion is not more reason
able than movement towards an end, and stilts are not
more convenient than shoes, but they are higher. In
everything the higher, when not the better, means what
folly or vanity cannot bear to abandon. Higher is a word
by which we defend the indefensible ; it Ts a declaration
of impenitence on the part of unreason, a cry to create
prejudice in favour of all that tyrannizes over mankind.
It is the watchword of the higher snob. The first to use
it was Satan, when he declared that he was not satisfied
to be anything but the highest ; whereas the highest thinks
it no derogation to take the form of the lowest since the
lowest, too, has its proper perfection, and there is nothing
better than that.

16
DISTINCTION IN ENGLISHMEN

ENGLAND has been rich in poets, in novelists, in inventors,
in philosophers making new beginnings, in intrepid
travellers, in learned men whose researches are a hobby
and almost a secret. The land was once rich in saints,
and is still rich in enthusiasts. But the official leaders of
the English people, the kings, prelates, professors, and
politicians, have usually been secondary men ; and even
they have been far more distinguished in their private
capacity than in their official action and mind. English
genius is anti-professional ; its affinities are with amateurs,
and there is something of the amateur in the best English
artists, actors, and generals. Delicacy of conscience,
mental haze, care not to outrun the impulse of the soul,
hold the Englishman back midway in his achievements ;
there is in him a vague respect for the unknown, a tacit

DISTINCTION IN ENGLISHMEN 53

diffidence in his own powers, which dissuade him from
venturing on the greatest things or from carrying them
out in a comprehensive manner. The truth is the British
do not wish to be well led. They are all individualistic
and aristocratic at heart, and want no leaders in ultimate
things ; the inner man must be his own guide. If they
had to live under the shadow of a splendid monarch, or a
masterful statesman, or an authoritative religion, or a
deified state they would not feel free. They wish to peck
at their institutions, and tolerate only such institutions as
they can peck at. A certain ineptitude thus comes to be
amongst them an aptitude for office : it keeps the official
from acquiring too great an ascendancy. There is a sort
of ostracism by anticipation, to prevent men who are too
good from coming forward and upsetting the balance of
British liberties ; very like the vacuum which is created in
America around distinction, and which keeps the national
character there so true to type, so much on one lively level.
But in England distinction exists, because it escapes into
privacy. It is reserved for his Grace in his library and her
Ladyship at her tea-table ; it fills the nursery with lisping
sweetness and intrepid singleness of will ; it dwells with
the poets in their solitary rambles and midnight question
ings ; it bends with the scholar over immortal texts ; it
is shut off from the profane by the high barriers of school
and college and hunting-field, by the sanctity and silence
of clubs, by the unspoken secrets of church and home.

The greatest distinction of English people, however, is
one which, whilst quite personal and private in its scope,
is widely diffused and strikingly characteristic of the better
part of the nation ; I mean, distinction in the way of
living. The Englishman does in a distinguished way the
simple things that other men might slur over as un
important or essentially gross or irremediable ; he is
distinguished — he is disciplined, skilful, and calm — in
eating, in sport, in public gatherings, in hardship, in
danger, in extremities. It is in physical and rudimentary
behaviour that the Englishman is an artist ; he is the ideal
sailor, the ideal explorer, the ideal comrade in a tight
place ; he knows how to be clean without fussiness, well-
dressed without show, and pleasure-loving without loud-

54 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

ness. This is why, although he is the most disliked of
men the world over (except where people need some one
they can trust) he is also the most imitated. What
ferocious Anglophobe, whether a white man or a black
man, is not immensely flattered if you pretend to have
mistaken him for an Englishman ? After all, this imitation
of the physical distinction of Englishmen is not absurd ;
here is something that can be imitated : it is really the
easiest way of doing easy things, which only bad education
and bad habits have made difficult for most people. There
is nothing impossible in adopting afternoon tea, football,
and boy scouts ; what is impossible, and if possible very
foolish, is to adopt English religion, philosophy, or political
institutions. But why should any one wish to adopt
them ? They have their merits, of course, and their
propriety at home ; but they are blind compromises, and it
is not in their principles that the English are distinguished,
but only in their practice. Their accents are more choice
than their words, and their words more choice than their
ideas. This, which might sound like a gibe, is to my mind
a ground for great hope and for some envy. Refinement,
like charity, should begin at home. First the body ought
to be made fit and decent, then speech and manners, and
habits justly combining personal initiative with the power
of co-operating with others ; and then, as this healthy life
extends, the world will begin to open out to the mind in
the right perspectives : not at first, perhaps never, in its
total truth and its real proportions, but with an ever-
enlarging appreciation of what, for us, it can contain.
The mind of the Englishman, starting in this proud and
humble and profound way from the inner man, pierces very
often, in single directions, to the limit of human faculty ;
and it seems to me to add to his humanity, without injury
to his speculation, that he instinctively withdraws again
into himself, as he might return home to marry and settle
after tempting fortune at the antipodes. His curious
knowledge and his personal opinions then become, as it
were, mementos of his distant adventures ; but his sterling
worth lies in himself. He is at his best when free impulse
or familiar habit takes an unquestioned lead, and when
the mind, not being expected to intervene, beats in easy

DISTINCTION IN ENGLISHMEN 55

unison with the scene and the occasion, like a rider at
home in the saddle and one with his galloping horse.
Then grace returns to him, so angular often in his forced
acts and his express tenets ; the smile comes unaffectedly,
and the blithe quick words flow as they should ; arm is
linked spontaneously in arm, laughter points the bull's-
eye of truth, the whole world and its mysteries, not being
pressed, become amiable, and the soul shines happy, and
beautiful, and absolute mistress in her comely house.
Nothing in him then is gross ; all is harmonized, all is
touched with natural life. His simplicity becomes whole
ness, and he no longer seems dull in any direction, but in
all things sound, sensitive, tender, watchful, and brave.

17
FRIENDSHIPS

FRIENDSHIP is almost always the union of a part of one
mind with a part of another ; people are friends in spots.
Friendship sometimes rests on sharing early memories,
as do brothers and schoolfellows, who often, but for that
now affectionate familiarity with the same old days, would
dislike and irritate one another extremely. Sometimes it
hangs on passing pleasures and amusements, or on special
pursuits ; sometimes on mere convenience and comparative
lack of friction in living together. One's friends are that
part of the human race with which one can be human.
But there are youthful friendships of quite another quality,
which I seem to have discovered flourishing more often
and more frankly in England than in other countries ;
brief echoes, as it were, of that love of comrades so much
celebrated in antiquity. I do not refer to the " friendship
of virtue " mentioned by Aristotle, which means, I suppose,
community in allegiance or in ideals. It may come to
that in the end, considered externally ; but community
in allegiance or in ideals, if genuine, expresses a common
disposition, and its roots are deeper and more physical
than itself. The friendship I have in mind is a sense of
this initial harmony between two natures, a union of one

56 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

whole man with another whole man, a sympathy between
the centres of their being, radiating from those centres
on occasion in unanimous thoughts, but not essentially
needing to radiate. Trust here is inwardly grounded ;
likes and dislikes run together without harness, like the
steeds of Aurora ; you may take agreement for granted
without words ; affection is generously independent of
all tests or external bonds ; it can even bear not to be
mutual, not to be recognized ; and in any case it shrinks
from the blatancy of open vows. In such friendships there
is a touch of passion and of shyness ; an understanding
which does not need to become explicit or complete. There
is wine in the cup ; it is not to be spilled nor gulped down
unrelished, but to be sipped slowly, soberly, in the long
summer evening, with the window open to the college
garden, and the mind full of all that is sweetest to the
mind.

Now there is a mystery here — though it need be no
mystery — which some people find strange and distressing
and would like to hush up. This profound physical
sympathy may sometimes, for a moment, spread to the
senses ; that is one of its possible radiations, though
fugitive ; and there is a fashionable psychology at hand
to explain all friendship, for that reason, as an aberration
of sex. Of course it is such in some people, and in many
people it may seem to be such at rare moments ; but it
would be a plain abuse of language to call a mother's love
for her children sexual, even when they are boys, although
certainly she could not have that love, nor those children,
if she had no sex. Perhaps if we had no sex we should
be incapable of tenderness of any sort ; but this fact does
not make all forms of affection similar in quality nor in
tendency. The love of friends is not, like the love of
woman, a lyrical prologue to nest - building. Engaging,
no doubt, the same radical instincts, in a different environ
ment and at another phase of their development, it turns
them, whilst still plastic, in other directions. Human
nature is still plastic, especially in the region of emotion,
as is proved by the ever-changing forms of religion and
art ; and it is not a question of right and wrong, nor even,
except in extreme cases, of health and disease, but only

FRIENDSHIPS 57

a question of alternative development, whether the human
capacity to love is absorbed in the family cycle, or extends
to individual friendships, or to communion with nature
or with God. The love of friends in youth, in the cases
where it is love rather than friendship, has a mystical
tendency. In character, though seldom in intensity, it
resembles the dart which, in an ecstatic vision, pierced the
heart of Saint Theresa, bursting the normal integument
by which the blood is kept coursing through generation
after generation, in the closed channel of human existence
and human slavery. Love then escapes from that round ;
it is, in one sense, wasted and sterilized ; but in being
diverted from its earthly labours it suffuses the whole
universe with light ; it casts its glowing colours on the
sunset, upon the altar, upon the past, upon the truth.
The anguished futility of love corrects its own selfishness,
its own illusion ; gradually the whole world becomes
beautiful in its inhuman immensity ; our very defeats
are transfigured, and we see that it was good for us to have
gone up into that mountain.

That such mystic emotions, whether in religion or in
friendship, are erotic was well known before the days of
Freud. They have always expressed themselves in erotic
language. And why should they not be erotic ? Sexual
passion is itself an incident in the life of the Psyche, a
transitive phase in the great cycle by which life on earth
is kept going. It grows insensibly out of bodily self-love,
childish play, and love of sensation ; it merges in the end,
after its midsummer night's dream, into parental and
kingly purposes. How casual, how comic, the purely
erotic impulse is, and how lightly nature plays with it,
may be seen in the passion of jealousy. Jealousy is in
separable from sexual love, and yet jealousy is not itself
erotic either in quality or in effect, since it poisons pleasure,
turns sympathy into suspicion, love into hate, all in the
interests of proprietorship. Why should we be jealous,
if we were simply merry ? Nature weaves with a wide
loom, and crosses the threads ; and erotic passion may be
as easily provoked peripherally by deeper impulses as be
itself the root of other propensities. Lovers sometimes
pretend at first to be only friends, and friends have some-

58 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

times fancied, at first blush, that they were lovers ; it is
as easy for one habit or sentiment as for the other to prove
the radical one, and to prevail in the end. As for English
men, the last thing they would do would be to disguise
some base prompting in high-flown language ; they would
call a spade a spade, if there were occasion. They are
shy of words, as of all manifestations ; and this very
shyness, if it proves that there is at bottom a vital instinct
concerned, also proves that it is not intrinsically more
erotic than social, nor more social than intellectual. It
is each of these things potentially, for such faculties are
not divided in nature as they are in language ; it may turn
into any one of them if accident leads it that way ; but it
reverts from every casual expression to its central seat,
which is the felt harmony of life with life, and of life with
nature, with everything that in the pulses of this world
beats our own measure, and swells the music of our
thoughts.

f •
18

DICKENS

IF Christendom should lose everything that is now in the
melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and
quite adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance
from the pages of Dickens. Who could not be happy in
his world ? Yet there is nothing essential to it which
the most destructive revolution would be able to destroy.
People would still be as different, as absurd, and as charm
ing as are his characters ; the springs of kindness and folly
in their lives would not be dried up. Indeed, there is
much in Dickens which communism, if it came, would
only emphasize and render universal. Those schools,
those poorhouses, those prisons, with those surviving
shreds of family life in them, show us what in the coming
age (with some sanitary improvements) would be the
nursery and home of everybody. Everybody would be a
waif, like Oliver Twist, like Smike, like Pip, and like David
Copperfield ; and amongst the agents and underlings of
social government, to whom all these waifs would be

DICKENS 59

entrusted, there would surely be a goodly sprinkling of
Pecksniffs, Squeers's, and Fangs ; whilst the Fagins
would be everywhere commissioners of the people. Nor
would there fail to be, in high places and in low, the
occasional sparkle of some Pickwick or Cheeryble Brothers
or Sam Weller or Mark Tapley ; and the voluble Flora
Finchings would be everywhere in evidence, and the
strong-minded Betsey Trotwoods in office. There would
also be, among the inefficient, many a Dora and Agnes and
Little Emily — with her charm but without her tragedy,
since this is one of the things which the promised social
reform would happily render impossible ; I mean, by
removing all the disgrace of it. The only element in the
world of Dickens which would become obsolete would be
the setting, the atmosphere of material instrumentalities
and arrangements, as travelling by coach is obsolete ;
but travelling by rail, by motor, or by airship will emotion
ally be much the same thing. It is worth noting how such
instrumentalities, which absorb modern life, are admired
and enjoyed by Dickens, as they were by Homer. The
poets ought not to be afraid of them ; they exercise the
mind congenially, and can be played with joyfully. Con
sider the black ships and the chariots of Homer, the coaches
and river-boats of Dickens, and the aeroplanes of to-day ;
to what would an unspoiled young mind turn with more
interest ? Dickens tells us little of English sports, but he
shares the sporting nature of the Englishman, to whom
the whole material world is a playing-field, the scene
giving ample scope to his love of action, legality, and
pleasant achievement. His art is to sport according to the
rules of the game, and to do things for the sake of doing
them, rather than for any ulterior motive.

It is remarkable, in spite of his ardent simplicity ,
and openness of heart, how insensible Dickens was to/
the greater themes of the human imagination — religion, '
science, politics, art. He was a waif himself, and utterly
disinherited. For example, the terrible heritage of conten
tious religions which fills the world seems not to exist for
him. In this matter he was like a sensitive child, with a
most religious disposition, but no religious ideas. Perhaps,
properly speaking, he had no ideas on any subject ; what

6o

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

he had was a vast sympathetic participation in the daily
life of mankind ; and what he saw of ancient institutions
made him hate them, as needless sources of oppression,
misery, selfishness, and rancour. His one political passion
was philanthropy, genuine but felt only on its negative,
reforming side ; of positive Utopias or enthusiasms we
hear nothing. The political background of Christendom is
only, so to speak, an old faded back-drop for his stage ;
a castle, a frigate, a gallows, and a large female angel with
white wings standing above an orphan by an open grave
— a decoration which has to serve for all the melodramas
in his theatre, intellectually so provincial and poor.
Common life as it is lived was varied and lovable enough
for Dickens, if only the pests and cruelties could be
removed from it. Suffering wounded him, but not vul
garity ; whatever pleased his senses and whatever shocked
them filled his mind alike with romantic wonder, with the
endless delight of observation. Vulgarity — and what can
we relish, if we recoil at vulgarity ? — was innocent and
amusing ; in fact, for the humorist, it was the spice of
life. There was more piety in being human than in being
pious. In reviving Christmas, Dickens transformed it
from the celebration of a metaphysical mystery into a
feast of overflowing simple kindness and good cheer ; the
church bells were still there — in the orchestra ; and the
angels of Bethlehem were still there — painted on the
back-curtain. Churches, in his novels, are vague, desolate
places where one has ghastly experiences, and where only
the pew-opener is human ; and such religious and political
conflicts as he depicts in Barnaby Rudge and in A Tale of
Two Cities are street brawls and prison scenes and con
spiracies in taverns, without any indication of the contrasts
in mind or interests between the opposed parties. Nor
had Dickens any lively sense for fine art, classical tradition,
science, or even the manners and feelings of the upper
classes in his own time and country : in his novels we may
almost say there is no army, no navy, no church, no sport,
no distant travel, no daring adventure, no feeling for the
watery wastes and the motley nations of the planet, and
— luckily, with his notion of them — no lords and ladies.
Even love of the traditional sort is hardly in Dickens's

DICKENS 61

sphere — I mean the soldierly passion in which a rather
rakish gallantry was sobered by devotion, and loyalty
rested on pride. In Dickens love is sentimental or
benevolent or merry or sneaking or canine ; in his last
book he was going to describe a love that was passionate
and criminal ; but love for him was never chivalrous,
never poetical. What he paints most tragically is a
quasi-paternal devotion in the old to the young, the love
of Mr. Peggotty for Little Emily, or of Solomon 'Gills for
Walter Gay. A series of shabby little adventures, such as
might absorb the interest of an average youth, were
romantic enough for Dickens.

I say he was disinherited, but he inherited the most
terrible negations. Religion lay on him like the weight
of the atmosphere, sixteen pounds to the square inch, yet
never noticed nor mentioned. He lived and wrote in
the shadow of the most awful prohibitions. Hearts petri
fied by legality and falsified by worldliness offered, indeed,
a good subject for a novelist, and Dickens availed himself
of it to the extent of always contrasting natural goodness
and happiness with whatever is morose ; but his morose
people were wicked, not virtuous in their own way ; so
that the protest of his temperament against his environ
ment never took a radical form nor went back to first
principles. He needed to feel, in his writing, that he
was carrying the sympathies of every man with him.
In him conscience was single, and he could not conceive
how it could ever be divided in other men. He denounced j
scandals without exposing shams, and conformed willingly «
and scrupulously to the proprieties. Lady Dedlock's \
secret, for instance, he treats as if it were the sin of Adam,
remote, mysterious, inexpiable. Mrs. Dombey is not
allowed to deceive her husband except by pretending to
deceive him. The seduction of Little Emily is left out
altogether, with the whole character of Steerforth, the
development of which would have been so important in
the moral experience of David Copperfield himself. \But it
is not public prejudice alone that plays the censor over
Dickens's art ; his own kindness and even weakness of
heart act sometimes as marplotsA The character of Miss
Mowcher, for example, so brilliantly introduced, was

62 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

evidently intended to be shady, and to play a very im
portant part in the story ; but its original in real life,
which was recognized, had to be conciliated, and the
sequel was omitted and patched up with an apology —
itself admirable — for the poor dwarf. Such a sacrifice
does honour to Dickens's heart ; but artists should meditate
on their works in time, and it is easy to remove any too
great likeness in a portrait by a few touches making it more
consistent than real people are apt to be ; and in this case,
if the little creature had been really guilty, how much more
subtle and tragic her apology for herself might have been,
like that of the bastard Edmund in King Lear \ So, too, in
Dombey and Son, Dickens could not bear to let Walter
Gay turn out badly, as he had been meant to do, and to
break his uncle's heart as well as the heroine's ; he was
accordingly transformed into a stage hero miraculously
saved from shipwreck, and Florence was not allowed to
reward the admirable Toots, as she should have done,
with her trembling hand. (But Dickens was no free artist ;
he had more genius than taste, a warm fancy not aided by
a thorough understanding of complex characters. He
worked under pressure, for money and applause, and often
had to cheapen in execution what his inspiration had so
vividly conceived/

What, then, is there left, if Dickens has all these limita
tions ? In our romantic disgust we might be tempted" to-
say, Nothing. But in fact almost everything is left, almost
everything that counts in the daily life of mankind, or that
by its presence or absence can determine whether life
shall be worth living or not ; because a simple good life is
worth living, and an elaborate bad life is not. There
remains in the first place eating and drinking ; relished
not bestially, but humanly, jovially, as the sane and
exhilarating basis for everything else. This is a sound
English beginning ; but the immediate sequel, as the
England of that day presented it to Dickens, is no less
delightful. There is the ruddy glow of the hearth ; the
sparkle of glasses and brasses and well-scrubbed pewter ;
the savoury fumes of the hot punch, after the tingle of the
wintry air ; the coaching-scenes, the motley figures and
absurd incidents of travel ; the changing sights and joys

DICKENS 63

of the road. And then, to balance this, the traffic of
ports and cities, the hubbub of crowded streets, the luxury
of shop-windows and of palaces not to be entered ; the
procession of the passers-by, shabby or ludicrously genteel ;
the dingy look and musty smell of their lodgings ; the
labyrinth of back-alleys, courts, and mews, with their
crying children, and scolding old women, and listless,
half-drunken loiterers. These sights, like fables, have a
sort of moral in them to which Dickens was very sensitive ;
the important airs of nobodies on great occasions, the
sadness and preoccupation of the great as they hasten by
in their mourning or on their pressing affairs ; the sadly
comic characters of the tavern ; the diligence of shop
keepers, like squirrels turning in their cages ; the children
peeping out everywhere like grass in an untrodden street ;
the charm of humble things, the nobleness of humble
people, the horror of crime, the ghastliness of vice, the
deft hand and shining face of virtue passing through the
midst of it all ; and finally a fresh wind of indifference
and change blowing across our troubles and clearing the
most lurid sky.

I do not know whether it was Christian charity or
naturalistic insight, or a mixture of both (for they ara \
closely akin) that attracted Dickens particularly to the * I
deformed, the half-witted, the abandoned, or those impeded
or misunderstood by virtue of some singular inner consecra
tion. The visible moral of these things, when brutal
prejudice does not blind us to it, comes very near to true
philosophy ; one turn of the screw, one flash of reflection,
and we have understood nature and human morality and
the relation between them.

In his love of roads and wayfarers, of river-ports and
wharves and the idle or sinister figures that lounge about
them, Dickens was like Walt Whitman ; and I think a
second Dickens may any day appear in America, when it
is possible in that land of hurry to reach the same degree
of saturation, the same unquestioning pleasure in the
familiar facts. The spirit of Dickens would be better able
to do justice to America than was that of Walt Whitman ;
because America, although it may seem nothing but a
noisy nebula to the impressionist, is not a nebula but a

64 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

concourse of very distinct individual bodies, natural and
social, each with its definite interests and story. Walt
Whitman had a sort of transcendental philosophy which
swallowed the universe whole, supposing there was a
universal spirit in things identical with the absolute spirit
that observed them ; but Dickens was innocent of any
such clap -trap, and remained a true spirit in his own
person. Kindly and clear-sighted, but self-identical and
unequivocally human, he glided through the slums like
one of his own little heroes, uncontaminated by their
squalor and confusion, courageous and firm in his clear
allegiances amid the flux of things, a pale angel at the
Carnival, his heart aflame^ his voice always flute-like in
its tenderness and warning^ This is the true relation of
spirit to existence, not the other which confuses them ;
for this earth (I cannot speak for the universe at large)
has no spirit of its own, but brings forth spirits only at
certain points, in the hearts and brains of frail living
creatures, who like insects flit through it, buzzing and
gathering what sweets they can ; and it is the spaces they
traverse in this career, charged with their own moral
burden, that they can report on or describe, not things
rolling on to infinity in their vain tides. To be hypnotized
by that flood would be a heathen idolatry. Accordingly
Walt Whitman, in his comprehensive democratic vistas,
could never see the trees for the wood, and remained
incapable, for all his diffuse love of the human herd, of
ever painting a character or telling a story ; the very
things in which Dickens was a master. It is this life of
the individual, as it may be lived in a given nation, that
determines the whole value of that nation to the poet, to
the moralist, and to the judicious historian. But for the
excellence of the typical single life, no nation deserves to
be remembered more than the sands of the sea ; and
America will not be a success, if every American is a
failure.

Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage
door ; the shabby little adventures of the actors in their
private capacity replace for him the mock tragedies which
they enact before a dreaming public. Mediocrity of circum
stances and mediocrity of soul for ever return to the centre

\. stanc

DICKENS 65

of his stage ; a more wretched or a grander existence is
sometimes broached, but the pendulum soon swings back,
and we return, with the relief with which we put on our
slippers after the most romantic excursion, to a golden
mediocrity — to mutton and beer, and to love and babies
in a suburban villa with one frowsy maid. Dickens-is^lEe
poet of those acres of yellow-brick-streets* which the traveller
sees from the railway viaducts as he approaches London ;
they need a poet, and they deserve one, since a complete
human life may very well be lived there. Their little
excitements and sorrows, their hopes and humours are
like those of the Wooden Midshipman in Dombey and
Son; but the sea is not far off, and the sky — Dickens
never forgets it — is above all those brief troubles. He
had a sentiment in the presence of this vast flatness of
human fates, in spite of their individual pungency, which
I think might well be the dominant sentiment of mankind
in the future ; a sense of happy freedom in littleness, an
open-eyed reverence and religion without words. This
universal human anonymity is like a sea, an infinitive
democratic desert, chock-full and yet the very image of
emptiness, with nothing in it for the mind, except, as the
Moslems say, the presence of Allah. Awe is the counterpart
of humility — and this is perhaps religion enough. The atom
in the universal vortex ought to be humble ; he ought to
see that, materially, he doesn't much matter, and that
morally his loves are merely his own, without authority
over the universe. He can admit without obloquy that
he is what he is ; and he can rejoice in his own being,
and in that of all other things in so far as he can share it
sympathetically. The apportionment of existence and of
fortune is in Other Hands ; his own portion is contentment,
vision, love, and laughter.

^Having humility, that most liberating of sentiments,
having a true" vision of human existence and joy in that
vision, Dickens had in a superlative degree the gift of
humour, of mimicry, of unrestrained farce. -, He was the
perfect comedian. When people say Dickens exaggerates,
it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They
probably have only notions of what things and people are ;
they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value.

F

66 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

Their minds run on in the region of discourse, where there
are masks only and no faces, ideas and no facts ; they have
little sense for those living grimaces that play from moment
to moment upon the countenance of the world. The world
is a perpetual caricature of itself ; at every moment it is
the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending
to be. But as it nevertheless intends all the time to be
something different and highly dignified, at the next
moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover up the
absurd thing it was ; so that a conventional world, a world
of masks, is superimposed on the reality, and passes in
every sphere of human interest for the reality itself.
Humour is the perception of this illusion, the fact allowed
to pierce here and there through the convention, whilst
the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had
not observed its absurdity. Pure comedy is more radical,
cruder, in a certain sense less human ; because comedy
throws the convention over altogether, revels for a moment
in the fact, and brutally says to the notions of mankind,
as if it slapped them in the face, There, take that ! That's
what you really are ! At this the polite world pretends to
laugh, not tolerantly as it does at humour, but a little
angrily. It does not like to see itself by chance in the
glass, without having had time to compose its features
for demure self -contemplation. " What a bad mirror," it
exclaims ; "it must be concave or convex ; for surely I
never looked like that. Mere caricature, farce, and horse
play. Dickens exaggerates ; I never was so sentimental as
that ; / never saw anything so dreadful ; / don't believe
there were ever any people like Quilp, or Squeers, or
Serjeant Buzfuz." But the polite world is lying ; there
are such people ; we are such people ourselves in our true
moments, in our veritable impulses ; but we are careful to
stifle and to hide those moments from ourselves and from
the world ; to purse and pucker ourselves into the mask
of our conventional personality ; and so simpering, we
profess that it is very coarse and inartistic of Dickens to
undo our life's work for us in an instant, and remind us
of what we are. And as to other people, though we may
allow that considered superficially they are often absurd,
we do not wish to dwell on their eccentricities, nor to mimic

DICKENS 67

them. On the contrary, it is good manners to look away
quickly, to suppress a smile, and to say to ourselves that
the ludicrous figure in the street is not at all comic, but a
dull ordinary Christian, and that it is foolish to give any
importance to the fact that its hat has blown off, that it
has slipped on an orange-peel and unintentionally sat on
the pavement, that it has a pimple on its nose, that its
one tooth projects over its lower lip, that it is angry with
things in general, and that it is looking everywhere for the
penny which it holds tightly in its hand. That may fairly
represent the moral condition of most of us at most times ;
but we do not want to think of it ; we do not want to see ;
we gloss the fact over ; we console ourselves before we
are grieved, and reassert our composure before we have
laughed. We are afraid, ashamed, anxious to be spared.
What displeases us in Dickens is that he does not spare
us ; he mimics things to the full ; he dilates and exhausts
and repeats ; he wallows. He is too intent on the passing
experience to look over his shoulder, and consider whether
we have not already understood, and had enough. He is
not thinking of us ; he is obeying the impulse of the passion,
the person, or the story he is enacting. This faculty, which
renders him a consummate comedian, is just what alienated
from him a later generation in which people of taste were
aesthetes and virtuous people were higher snobs ; they
wanted a mincing art, and he gave them copious improviza-
tion, they wanted analysis and development, and he gave
them absolute comedy. I must confess, though the fault is
mine and not his, that sometimes his absoluteness is too
much for me. When I come to the death of Xittfe Nell,
or to What the Waves were always Saying, or even to the
incorrigible perversities of the pretty Dora, I skip. I can't
take my liquor neat in such draughts, and my inner man
says to Dickens, Please don't. But then I am a coward
in so many ways ! There are so many things in this world
that I skip, as I skip the undiluted Dickens ! When I
reach Dover on a rough day, I wait there until the Channel
is smoother ; am I not travelling for pleasure ? But my
prudence does not blind me to the admirable virtue of the
sailors that cross in all weathers, nor even to the automatic
determination of the sea-sick ladies, who might so easily

68 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

have followed my example, if they were not the slaves of
their railway tickets and of their labelled luggage. They
are loyal to their tour, and I to my philosophy. Yet as
wrapped in my great-coat and sure of a good dinner, I
pace the windy pier and soliloquize, I feel the superiority
of the bluff tar, glad of breeze, stretching a firm arm to the
unsteady passenger, and watching with a masterful thrill
of emotion the home cliffs receding and the foreign coasts
ahead. It is only courage (which Dickens had without
knowing it) and universal kindness (which he knew he had)
that are requisite to nerve us for a true vision of this world.
And as some of us are cowards about crossing the Channel,
and others about " crossing the bar," so almost everybody
is a coward about his own humanity. We do not consent
to be absurd, though absurd we are. We have no funda
mental humility. We do not wish the moments of our
lives to be caught by a quick eye in their grotesque initia
tive, and to be pilloried in this way before our own eyes.
For that reason we don't like Dickens, and don't like comedy,
and don't like the truth. Dickens could don the comic
mask with innocent courage ; he could wear it with a
grace, ease, and irresistible vivacity seldom given to men.
We must go back for anything like it to the very greatest
comic poets, to Shakespeare or to Aristophanes. Who else,
for instance, could have penned this :

" It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it," urged Mr.
Bumble ; first looking round to ascertain that his partner
had left the room.

" That is no excuse," replied Mr. Brownlow. " You were
present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets,
and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the
law ; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your
direction."

" If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing
his hat emphatically in both hands, " the law is a ass, a idiot.
If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor ; and the
worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by
experience — by experience."

Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words,
Mr. Bumble fixed his hat on very tight, and putting his hands
in his pockets, followed his helpmate downstairs.

DICKENS 69

This is high comedy ; the irresistible, absurd, intense
dream of the old fool, personifying the law in order to
convince and to punish it. I can understand that this sort
of thing should not be common in English literature, nor
much relished ; because pure comedy is scornful, merciless,
devastating, holding no door open to anything beyond.
Cultivated English feeling winces at this brutality, although
the common people love it in clowns and in puppet shows ;
and I think they are right. Dickens, who surely was
tender enough, had so irresistible a comic genius that it
carried him beyond the gentle humour which most English
men possess to the absolute grotesque reality. Squeers,
for instance, when he sips the wretched dilution which he
has prepared for his starved and shivering little pupils,
smacks his lips and cries : " Here's richness I " It is
savage comedy ; humour would come in if we understood
(what Dickens does not tell us) that the little creatures
were duly impressed and thought the thin liquid truly
delicious. I suspect that English sensibility prefers the
humour and wit of Hamlet to the pure comedy of Falstaff ;
and that even in Aristophanes it seeks consolation in the
lyrical poetry for the flaying of human life in the comedy
itself. Tastes are free ; but we should not deny that
in merciless and rollicking comedy life is caught in the
act. The most grotesque creatures of Dickens are not
exaggerations or mockeries of something other than them
selves ; they arise because nature generates them, like
toadstools ; they exist because they can't help it, as we
all do. The fact that these perfectly self -justified beings
are absurd appears only by comparison, and from outside ;
circumstances, or the expectations of other people, make
them ridiculous and force them to contradict themselves ;
but in nature it is no crime to be exceptional. Often, but
for the savagery of the average man, it would not even be
a misfortune. The sleepy fat boy in Pickwick looks foolish ;
but in himself he is no more foolish, nor less solidly self-
justified, than a pumpkin lying on the ground. Toots
seems ridiculous ; and we laugh heartily at his incoherence,
his beautiful waistcoats, and his extreme modesty ; but
when did anybody more obviously grow into what he is
because he couldn't grow otherwise ? So with Mr. Pickwick,

70 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Micawber, and all
the rest of this wonderful gallery ; they are ridiculous only
by accident, and in a context in which they never intended
to appear. If Oedipus and Lear and Cleopatra do not seem
ridiculous, it is only because tragic reflection has taken
them out of the context in which, in real life, they would
have figured. If we saw them as facts, and not as
emanations of a poet's dream, we should laugh at them
till doomsday ; what grotesque presumption, what silly
whims, what mad contradiction of the simplest realities !
Yet we should not laugh at them without feeling how real
their griefs were ; as real and terrible as the griefs of
children and of dreams. But facts, however serious
inwardly, are always absurd outwardly ; and the just
critic of life sees both truths at once, as Cervantes did in
Don Quixote. A pompous idealist who does not see the
ridiculous in all things is the dupe of his sympathy and
abstraction ; and a clown, who does not see that these
ridiculous creatures are living quite in earnest, is the dupe
of his egotism. Dickens saw the absurdity, and understood
the life ; I think he was a good philosopher.

It is usual to compare Dickens with Thackeray, which
is like comparing the grape with the gooseberry ; there are
obvious points of resemblance, and the gooseberry has
some superior qualities of its own ; but you can't make
red wine of it. The wine of Dickens is of the richest, the
purest, the sweetest, the most fortifying to the blood ;
there is distilled in it, with the perfection of comedy, the
perfection of morals. I do not mean, of course, that Dickens
appreciated all the values that human life has or might
have ; that is beyond any man. Even the greatest philo
sophers, such as Aristotle, have not always much imagina
tion to conceive forms of happiness or folly other than
those which their age or their temperament reveals to them ;
their insight runs only to discovering the principle of
happiness, that it is spontaneous life of any sort harmonized
with circumstances. The sympathies and imagination of
Dickens, vivid in their sphere, were no less limited in range ;
and of course it was not his business to find philosophic
formulas ; nevertheless I call his the perfection of morals
for two reasons : that he put the distinction between good

DICKENS 71

and evil in the right place, and that he felt this distinction
intensely. A moralist might have excellent judgement, he
might see what sort of life is spontaneous in a given being
and how far it may be harmonized with circumstances, yet
his heart might remain cold, he might not suffer nor rejoice
with the suffering or joy he foresaw. Humanitarians like
Bentham and Mill, who talked about the greatest happiness
of the greatest number, might conceivably be moral prigs
in their own persons, and they might have been chilled to
the bone in their theoretic love of mankind, if they had
had the wit to imagine in what, as a matter of fact, the
majority would place their happiness. Even if their theory
had been correct (which I think it was in intention, though
not in statement) they would then not have been perfect
moralists, because their maxims would not have expressed
their hearts. In expressing their hearts, they ought to
have embraced one of those forms of " idealism " by which
men fortify themselves in their bitter passions or in their
helpless commitments ; for they do not wish mankind to
be happy in its own way, but in theirs. Dickens was not
one of those moralists who summon every man to do
himself the greatest violence so that he may not offend
them, nor defeat their ideals. Love of the good of others
is something that shines in every page of Dickens with a
truly celestial splendour. How entirely limpid is his
sympathy with life — a sympathy uncontaminated by
dogma or pedantry or snobbery or bias of any kind !
How generous is this keen, light spirit, how pure this
open heart ! And yet, in spite of this extreme sensibility,
not the least wobbling ; no deviation from a just severity
of judgement, from an uncompromising distinction between
white and black. And this happens as it ought to happen ;
sympathy is not checked by a flatly contrary prejudice
or commandment, by some categorical imperative irrelevant
to human nature ; the check, like the cheer, comes by
tracing the course of spontaneous impulse amid circum
stances that inexorably lead it to success or to failure.
There is a bed to this stream, freely as the water may flow ;
when it comes to this precipice it must leap, when it runs
over these pebbles it must sing, and when it spreads into
that marsh it must become livid and malarial. The very

'

72 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

sympathy with human impulse quickens in Dickens the
sense of danger ; his very joy in joy, makes him stern to
what kills it. How admirably drawn are his surly villains !
No rhetorical vilification of them, as in a sermon ; no
exaggeration of their qualms or fears ; rather a sense of
how obvious and human all their courses seem from their
own point of view ; and yet ho sentimental apology for
them, no romantic worship of rebels in their madness or
crime. The pity of it, the waste of it all, are seen not by
a second vision but by the same original vision which
revealed the lure and the drift of the passion. Vice is a
monster here of such sorry mien, that the longer *we see
it the more we deplore it ; that other sort of vice which
Pope found so seductive was perhaps only some innocent
impulse artificially suppressed, and called a vice because
it broke out inconveniently and displeased the company.
True vice is human nature strangled by the suicide of
attempting the impossible. Those so self-justified villains
of Dickens never elude their fates. Bill Sikes is not let
off, neither is Nancy ; the oddly benevolent Magwitch does
not escape from the net, nor does the unfortunate young
Richard Carstone, victim of the Circumlocution Office.
The horror 'and ugliness of their fall are rendered with the
hand of a master ; we see here, as in the world, that in
spite of the romanticists it is not virtue to rush enthusiasti
cally along any road. I think Dickens is one of the best
friends mankind has ever had. He has held the mirror up
to nature, and of its reflected fragments has composed a
fresh world, where the men and women differ from real
people only in that they live in a literary medium, so that
all ages and places may know them. And they are worth
knowing, just as one's neighbours are, for their picturesque
characters and their pathetic fates. Their names should
be in every child's mouth ; they ought to be adopted
members of every household. Their stories cause the
merriest and the sweetest chimes to ring in the fancy,
without confusing our moral judgement or alienating our
interest from the motley commonplaces of daily life. In
every English-speaking home, in the four quarters of the
globe, parents and children will do well to read Dickens
aloud of a winter's evening ; they will love winter, and

DICKENS 73

one another, - and God the better for it. What a wreath
that will be of ever-fresh holly, thick with bright berries, to
hang to this poet's memory — the very crown he would
have chosen !

THE HUMAN SCALE

GREAT buildings often have great doors ; but great doors
are heavy to swing, and if left open they may let in too
much dold or glare ; so that we sometimes observe a small
postern cut into one leaf of the large door for more con
venient entrance and exit, and it is seldom or never that
the monumental gates yawn in their somnolence. Here
is the modest human scale reasserting itself in the midst
of a titanic structure, but it reasserts itself with an ill
grace and in the interests of frailty ; the patch it makes
seems unintended and ignominious.

Yet the human scale is not essentially petty ; when
it does not slip in as a sort of interloper it has nothing to
apologize for. Between the infinite and the infinitesimal
all sizes are equally central. The Greeks, the Saracens,
the English, the Chinese, and Japanese instinctively retain
the human scale in all that part of their work which is
most characteristic of them and nearest to their affections.
A Greek temple or the hall of an English mansion can be
spacious and dignified enough, but they do not outrun
familiar uses, and they lend their spaciousness and dignity
to the mind, instead of crushing it. Everything about them
has an air of friendliness and sufficiency ; their elegance
is not pompous, and if they are noble they are certainly
not vast, cold, nor gilded.

The Saracens, Chinese, and Japanese in their various
ways use the human scale with even greater refinement,
for they apply it also in a sensuous and psychological
direction. Not only is the size of their works moderate by
preference, like their brief lyrics, but they exactly meet
human sensibility by a great delicacy and concentration
in design and a fragrant simplicity in workmanship.
Everything they make is economical in its beauty and

74 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

seems to say to us : "I exist only to be enjoyed ; there is
nothing in me not merely delightful." Here the human
scale is not drawn from the human body so much as from
the human soul ; its faculties are treated with deference —
I mean the faculties it really has, not those, like reason,
which a flattering philosophy may impute to it.

An English country house which is a cottage in appear
ance may turn out on examination to be almost a palace
in extent and appointments ; there is no parade, yet there
is great profusion — too much furniture, too many orna
ments, too much food, too many flowers, too many people.
Everything there is on the human scale except the quantity
of things, which is oppressive. The Orientals are poorer,
more voluptuous, and more sensitive to calligraphy ;
they leave empty spaces about them and enjoy one thing
at a time and enjoy it longer.

One reason for this greater subtlety and mercifulness
in the art of Orientals is perhaps the fiercer assault made
on their senses by nature. The Englishman lives in a
country which is itself on the human scale, clement at all
seasons, charming with a gently inconstant atmospheric
charm. The rare humanity of nature in his island
permeates his being from boyhood up with a delight that
is half sentimental, half physical and sporting. In his
fields and moors he grows keen and fond of exertion ;
there too his friendships and his estimates of men are
shaped unawares, as if under some silent superior influence.
There he imbibes the impressions that make him tender to
poetry. He may not require great subtlety in his poets,
but he insists that their sentiment shall have been felt
and their images seen, and while the obvious, even the
shamelessly obvious, does not irritate him, he hates cheap
sublimity and false notes. He respects experience and is
master of it in his own field.

Thus the empty spaces with which a delicate art likes
to surround itself are supplied for the Englishman by his
comradeship with nature, his ranging habits, and the
reticence of his imagination. There the unexpressed
dimension, the background of pregnant silence, exists for
him in all its power. For the Saracen, on the contrary,
nature is an abyss : parched deserts, hard mountains,

THE HUMAN SCALE 75

night with its overwhelming moon. Here the human scale
is altogether transgressed ; nature is cruel, alien, excessive,
to be fled from with a veiled face. For a relief and solace
he builds his house without windows ; he makes his life
simple, his religion a single phrase, his art exquisite and
slight, like the jet of his fountain. It is sweet and necessary
that the works of man should respect the human scale
when everything in nature so infinitely transcends it.

Why the Egyptians loved things colossal I do not
know, but the taste of the Romans for the grandiose is
easier to understand. It seems to have been part and
parcel of that yearning for the super-human which filled
late antiquity. This yearning took two distinct directions.
Among the worldly it fostered imperialism, organization,
rhetoric, portentous works, belief in the universality and
eternity of Rome, and actual deification of emperors.
Among the spiritually-minded it led to a violent abstraction
from the world, so that the soul in its inward solitude
might feel itself inviolate and divine. The Christians at
first belonged of course to the latter party ; they detested
the inflation of the empire, with its cold veneer of marble
and of optimism ; they were nothing if not humble and
dead to the world. Their catacombs were perforce on the
human scale, as a coffin is ; but even when they emerged
to the surface, they reduced rather than enlarged the
temples and basilicas bequeathed to them by the pagans.
Apart from a few imperial structures at Constantinople
or Ravenna their churches for a thousand years kept to
the human scale ; often they were diminutive ; when
necessary they were spread out to hold multitudes, but
remained low and in the nature of avenues to a tomb or a
shrine. The centre was some sombre precinct, often
subterranean, where the inward man might commune with
the other world. The sacraments were received with a
bowed head ; they did not call for architectural vistas.
The sumptuousness that in time encrusted these sanctuaries
was that of a jewel — the Oriental, interior, concentrated
sumptuousness of the cloistered arts. Yet the open-air
pagan tradition was not dead. Roman works were every
where, and not all in ruins, and love of display and of
plastic grandiloquence lay hardly dormant in the breast

76 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

of many. It required only a little prosperity to dispel the
mystical humility and detachment which Christianity
had brought with it at first ; and the human scale of the
Christian Greeks yielded at the first opportunity to the
gigantic scale of the Romans. Spaces were cleared, vaults
were raised, arches were made pointed in order that they
might be wider and be poised higher, towers and spires
were aimed at the clouds, usually getting only half way,
porches became immense caverns. Brunelleschi accom
plished a tour de force in his dome and Michelangelo another
in his, even more stupendous. These various strained
models, straining in divergent directions, have kept artists
uneasy and impotent ever since, except when under some
benign influence they have recovered the human scale,
and in domestic architecture or portrait painting have
forgotten to be grand and have become felicitous.

The same movement is perhaps easier to survey in
philosophy than in architecture. Scarcely had Socrates
brought investigation down from the heavens and limited
it to morals — a realm essentially on the human scale —
when his pupils hastened to undo his work by projecting
their moral system again into the sky, denaturalizing both
morals and nature. They imagined a universe circling
about man, tempering the light for his eyes and making
absolute his childlike wishes and judgements. This was
humanism out of scale and out of place, an attempt to
cut not the works of man but the universe to human
measure. It was the nemesis that overtook the Greeks
for having become too complacently human. Earlier the
monstrous had played a great part in their religion ; hence
forth that surrounding immensity having been falsely
humanized, their modest humanity itself had to be made
monstrous to fill its place.

Hence we see the temples growing larger and larger,
the dome introduced, things on the human scale piled on
one another to make a sublime fabric, like Saint Sophia,
triumphal arches on pedestals not to be passed through,
vain columns like towers, with a statue poised on the
summit like a weathercock, and finally doors so large that
they could not be opened and little doors had to be cut in
them for men to use. So the human scale turned up

THE HUMAN SCALE 77

again irrepressibly, but for the moment without its native
dignity, because it had been stretched to compass a lifeless
dignity quite other than its own.

20
ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE

NESTS were the first buildings ; I suppose the birds built
them long before man ceased to be four-footed or four-
handed, and to swing by his tail from trees. The nests
of man were coverts, something between a hole in the
ground and an arbour ; a retreat easily turned into a wig
wam, a hut, or a tent, when once man had begun to flay
animals and to weave mats. From the tent we can imagine
the cart developing — one of the earliest of human habita
tions — and from the cart the boat : tents, boats, and carts
(as the Englishman knows so well) are in a manner more
human than houses ; they are the shelters of freemen.
Some men, those destined to higher things, are migratory ;
they have imagination, being haunted by absent things,
and distance of itself allures them, even if dearth or danger
does not drive them on ; indeed, dearth and danger would
not of themselves act as incentives to migration, if some
safer and greener paradise were not present to the fancy.
Ranging into varied climates, these men feel the need of
that portable shelter which we call clothes ; and at a
slightly greater distance from their skins, they surround
themselves with a second integument, also portable, the
tent, cart, or boat. The first home of man is appropriately
without foundations, except in the instincts of his soul ;
and it is only by a slight anchorage to the earth, in some
tempting glen or by some flowing river, that the cart,
boat, or tent becomes a dwelling-house. Here I see the
secret of that paradox, that the English people who have
invented the word home, should be such travellers and
colonists, and should live so largely and so contentedly
abroad. Home is essentially portable ; it has no terrene
foundation, like a tomb, a well, or an altar ; it is an
integument of the living man, as the body itself is ; and as

78 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

the body is more than the raiment, and determines its
form, so the inner man is more than his dwelling, and
causes it to mould and to harden itself round him like a
shell, wherever he may be. Home is built round his bed,
his cupboard, and his chimney-corner ; and such a nest, if
it fits his habits, is home all the world over, from Hudson's
Bay to Malacca ; at least, it becomes home when the inner
man, as he is prompted inwardly to do, surrounds himself
there with a family ; for a home is a nest, and somehow
incomplete without an egg to sit on.

This seems to me to be the true genealogy of English
architecture, in so far as it is English. Strictly speaking,
there is no English architecture at all, only foreign archi
tecture adapted and domesticated in England. But how
thoroughly and admirably domesticated ! How entirely
transmuted inwardly from the classic tragic monumental
thing it was, into something which, even if in abstract
design it seems unchanged, has a new expression, a new
scale, a new subordination of part to part, and as it were
a new circulation of the blood within it ! It has all been
made to bend and to cling like ivy round the inner man ;
it has all been rendered domestic and converted into a
home. Far other was the character proper to nobler
architecture in its foreign seats. There it had been essenti
ally military, religious, or civic : it had begun perhaps with
a slight modification or rearrangement of great stones lying
on the ground, perhaps infinitely rooted in its depths.
Its centre was no living person, but some spot with a magic
and compulsive influence, or with a communal function ;
it came to glorify three slabs — the tomb, the hearth, and
the altar — and to render them monumental. The tribe
or the king had a treasure to be roofed over and walled
in ; the mound where the dead lay buried was marked
with a heap of stones ; pillars were set up to the right and
to the left of the presiding deity, to dignify the place where
he delivered true oracles, and dispensed magic powers.
This deity himself was a pillar, scarcely humanized in form,
or fantastically named after some animal ; and as he grew
colossal, and his features took form and colour, his sacred
head had to be arched over with more labour and art ;
and the approach to him was impressively delayed through

ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE 79

pylons, courts, narthex, or nave, into the sepulchral darkness
of the holy of holies. Similarly defences grew into citadels,
and judgement-seats into palaces ; and as for individual
men, if they did not sleep in the embrasure of some temple
gate, or under some public stair, they found cubicles in the
galleries of the king's court, or built themselves huts to
breed in under the lee of the fortifications.

This sort of architecture has a tragic character ; it
dominates the soul rather than expresses it, and embodies
stabilities and powers far older than any one man, and far
more lasting. It confronts each generation like an inexor
able deity, like death and war and labour ; life is passed,
thoughtlessly but not happily, under that awful shadow.
Of course, there are acolytes in the temple and pages in the
palace that scamper all over the most hallowed precincts,
tittering and larking ; and the same retreats may seem
luminous and friendly afterwards to the poet, the lover,
or the mind bereaved ; yet in their essential function these
monuments are arresting, serious, silent, overwhelming ;
they are a source of terror and compunction, like tragedy ;
they are favourable to prayer, ecstasy, and meditation.
At other times they become the scene of enormous gather
ings, of parades and thrilling celebrations ; but always it is
a vast affair, like a court ball, in which one insinuates
one's littleness into what corner one can, to see and feel
the movement of the whole, without playing any great
part in it. Even the most amiable forms of classic archi
tecture have this public character. There is the theatre
and the circus, into which one must squeeze one's person
uncomfortably, in order to subject one's mind to contagious
emotions, and the judgements of the crowd ; and even
the public fountain, at which the housemaids and water-
boys wait for their turn, plays for ever far above the heads
of the people ; as if that Neptune and those dolphins
were spouting for their own pleasure, cooling the sun
shine for their own bronze limbs, and never caring whether
they soused the passing mortal, or quenched his thirst.

All these forms and habits are intensely un-English, and
yet England is full of vestiges of them, not only because
its fine arts are derived from abroad, but because, however
disguised, the same tragic themes must appear everywhere.

80 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

The tomb, the temple, the fortress are obligatory things ;
but they become properly English in character only when
their public function recedes into the background, and they
become interesting to the inner man by virtue of associations
or accidents which harmonize them with his sentimental
experience. They grow English in growing picturesque.
These castles and abbeys were Norman when they were
built, they were expressions of domination and fear, hard,
crude, practical, and foreign. But now the moat is grass-
grown, the cloister in ruins, the headless saints are posts
for the roses to creep over, the frowning keep has lost its
battlements and become a comfortable mansion mantled
with ivy ; before it the well-dressed young people play
croquet on the lawn ; and the chapel, whitewashed within,
politely furnished with pews, and politely frequented on
Sundays, is embowered in a pretty garden of a graveyard,
which the yew seems to sanctify more than the cross,
and the flowers to suit better than the inscriptions ; there
is a bench there round the great tree, where the old villagers
sit of an evening, and its branches, far overtopping the
church spire with its restored sun-dial, seem to dispense
a surer grace and protection than the church itself : they
seem more unequivocally the symbol and the work of
God. So everything, in its ruin, seems in England to live
a new life ; and it is only this second life, this cottage
built in the fallen stronghold, that is English.

If great architecture has a tragic character, it does not
exclude, in the execution, a certain play of fancy, a sportive
use of the forms which the needful structure imposes ; and
these decorative frills or arbitrary variations of theme
might be called comic architecture. This is the side of the
art which is subject to fashion, and changes under the
same influences, with the same swiftness and the same
unanimity. But as fashions among peasants sometimes
last for ages, so certain decorative themes, although quite
arbitrary, sometimes linger on because of the inertia of
the eye, which demands what it is used to, or the poverty
of invention in the designer. The worst taste and the best
taste revel in decoration ; but the motive here is play
and there display. The Englishman deprecates both ; he
abominates the tawdry, the theatrical, the unnecessarily

ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE 81

elaborate ; and at the same time he is shy of novelty and
playfulness ; give him comfortable old grey clothes, good
for all weathers, and comfortable, pleasing, inconspicuous
houses, where he can live without feeling a fool or being
the victim of his possessions. The comic poses of archi
tecture, which come to him from abroad, together with its
tragic structure, he accordingly tones down and neutralizes
as far as possible. How gently, for instance, how pleasantly
the wave of Italian architecture broke on these grassy
shores ! The classic line, which is tragic in its simple
veracity and fixity, had already been submerged in attempts
to vary it ; in England, as in France, the Gothic habit of
letting each part of a building have its own roof and its
own symmetry, at once introduced the picturesque into
the most " classic " designs. The Italian scale, too, was
at once reduced, and the Italian rhetoric in stone, the
baroque and the spectacular, was obliterated. How
pleasantly the Palladian forms were fitted to their English
setting ; how the windows were widened and subdivided,
the show pediments forgotten, the wreathed urns shaved
into modest globes, the pilasters sensibly broadened into
panels, and the classical detail applied to the native Gothic
framework, with its gables, chimneys, and high roofs ;
whence the delightful brood of Jacobean and Queen Anne
houses ; and in the next generation the so genteel, so
judicious Georgian mansion, with its ruddy brick, its broad
windows, and its delicate mouldings and accessories of
stone. The tragic and the comic were spirited away
together, and only the domestic remained.

Nevertheless, at one of the greatest moments in its
history, England had seemed to revel in comic art, and to
have made it thoroughly its own. Domestic taste had
reduced Gothic too, in England, to the human scale ; pro
digies of height and width in vaulting were not attempted,
doors remained modest, hooded, perhaps, with an almost
rustic porch ; the vast spaces were subdivided, they were
encrusted with ornament ; the lines became playful, fan-
tracery was invented, and floral pendants of stone ; the
walls became all glass, the ceilings carved bowers, and
Gothic seemed on the point of smothering its rational
skeleton altogether in luxurious trappings and the millinery

G

82 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

of fashion. All England seemed to become one field of the
cloth of gold ; rooms looked like gilded palanquins or
silken tents, roofs were forests of bannerets, pinnacles, and
weathercocks ; heraldry (a comic art) overspread every
garment and utensil. Poetry, too, became euphuistic and
labyrinthine and nevertheless friendly and familiar and
full of a luscious humour, like the wit of the people. Even
prose was a maze of metaphors and conceits, every phrase
was embroidered, and no self-respecting person could say
yea or nay without some artful circumlocution. It was
this outburst of universal comedy that made Shakespeare
possible — an exuberant genius in some respects not like
a modern Englishman ; he rose on the crest of a somewhat
exotic wave of passion and vivacity, which at once subsided.
Some vestiges of that spirit seem to linger in American
manners ; but for the most part puritanism killed it ; and
I do not think we need regret its loss. What could England
have been but for the triumph of Protestantism there ?
Only a coarser France, or a cockney Ireland. The puritan
stiffening was essential to raise England to its external
dignity and greatness ; and it was needed to fortify the
inner man, to sober him, and persuade him to be worthy of
himself. As for comic art, there is enough of it elsewhere,
in the oriental and the French schools, and in painting and
drawing, if not in architecture, all the younger artists are
experimenting with it. The sort of aestheticism which was
the fashion in London at the end of the nineteenth century
tried to be playful, and to dote on art for its own sake ;
but in reality it was full of a perverted moralism ; the
aesthetes were simply Ruskin's pupils running away from
school ; they thought it immensely important to be choice,
and quite disgraceful to think of morals. The architecture
of that time was certainly not comic in my sense of the
word, it did not give a free rein to exuberant fancy : it
was only railway Gothic. But in England the mists and
the ivy and the green sward and the dark screening trees
can make endurable even that abortion of the ethics of
Ruskin : and with better models, and less wilfulness, I see
the fresh building of to-day recovering a national charm :
the scale small, the detail polyglot, the arrangement
gracious and convenient, the marriage with the green earth

ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE 83

and the luminous air, foreseen and prepared for. Domestic
architecture in England follows to the letter the advice
of Polonius :

Costly thy garment as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy : rich, not gaudy.

21

THE ENGLISH CHURCH

COMPROMISE is odious to passionate natures because it
seems a surrender, and to intellectual natures because it
seems a confusion ; but to the inner man, to the profound
Psyche within us, whose life is warm, nebulous, and plastic,
compromise seems the path of profit and justice. Health
has many conditions ; life is a resultant of many forces.
Are there not several impulses in us at every moment ?
Are there not several sides to every question ? Has not
every party caught sight of something veritably right and
good ? Is not the greatest practicable harmony, or the
least dissension, the highest good ? And if by the word
" truth " we designate not the actual order of the facts,
nor the exact description of them, but some inner symbol
of reconciliation with reality on our own part, bringing
comfort, safety, and assurance, then truth also will lie in
compromise : truth will be partly truth to oneself, partly
workable convention and plausibility. A man's life as it
flows is not a theorem to which there is any one rigid
solution. It is composed of many strands and looks to
divers issues. There is the love of home and the lure of
adventure ; there is chastity which is a good, and there is
love which is a good also ; work must leave room for sport,
science for poetry, and reason for prejudice. Can it be a
man's duty to annul any of the elements that make up
his moral being and, because he possesses a religious
tradition, shall he refuse the gifts of his senses, of his
affections, of his country and its history, of the ruling
science, morality, and taste of his day ? Far from it :
religion, says the inner man, ought rather to be the highest
synthesis of our nature, and make room for all these things.

84 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

It should not succumb to any dead or foreign authority
that ignores or dishonours them. The Englishman finds
that he was born a Christian, and therefore wishes to
remain a Christian ; but his Christianity must be his own,
no less plastic and adaptable than his inner man ; and it
is an axiom with him that nothing can be obligatory for
a Christian which is unpalatable to an Englishman.

Only a few years ago, if a traveller landing in England
on a Sunday and entering an Anglican church, had been
told that the country was Catholic and its church a branch
of the Catholic church, his astonishment would have been
extreme. " Catholic " is opposed in the first place to
national and in the second place to Protestant ; how then,
he would have asked himself, can a church be Catholic
that is so obviously and dismally Protestant, and so
narrowly and primly national ? Why then this abuse of
language ? And why this silly provincialism of insisting
on always calling Catholics Roman Catholics, as if there
were any others, and they were not known by that name
all the world over ? Nevertheless, the restoration of an
elder Anglicanism in our day has somewhat softened these
paradoxes ; and when we remember how fondly the English
screen their instincts in legal fictions and in genteel shams,
the paradoxes vanish altogether.

What is Protestantism ? It is all things to all men, if
they are Protestants : but I see in it three leading motifs :
to revert to primitive Christianity, to inspire moral and
political reform, and to accept the religious witness of the
inner man. Now the Church of England, intensely Pro
testant as it seemed until the other day, is not Protestant
in any of these respects. No established national church
could possibly be so. The subjection to Parliament which
renders the English church not Catholic, renders it also
not Protestant. To a primitive Christian, to a puritan
reformer or to a transcendental mystic, a religion estab
lished by lay authority is a contradiction in terms ; a lay
government may be more or less inspired by righteous
ness, but it cannot mediate salvation. A Protestant is
essentially a nonconformist. Moreover, if we examine the
theology of the English church, we see that whilst inci
dentally very heretical, it is still fundamentally Catholic ;

THE ENGLISH CHURCH 85

it admits only a single deposit of faith and one apostolic
fountain of grace for all mankind. But in its view heresy
in any branch of the church does not cut it off from the
tree. Heresy is something to which all churches are liable ;
the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople fall
into it hardly less often or less desperately than the arch
bishop of Canterbury himself. Heresy is to be conceived
as eccentricity within the fold, not as separation from it ;
it is the tacking of the ship on its voyage. Saint Peter or
Saint Paul or both of them must have been heretical in
their little controversies ; and Christ himself must have
had at times, if not always, but a partial view of the truth ;
for instance, in respect to the date and the material nature
of his second coming. Accordingly, although it may be a
little trying to the nerves, it is no essential scandal that a
curate should be addicted to Mariolatry, or that a dean
should be unfortunately ambiguous on the subject of the
Incarnation : such rapids and backwaters in the stream
of Christian thought only prove how broad and full it is
capable of being.

That many Catholic bodies, if not all, should be con
stantly schismatic or heretical, is therefore no paradox
with this conception of the church ; and it is obvious that
Rome itself is heretical and schismatic on this theory,
since it has laid an exaggerated weight on the text about
Peter and the keys, and has claimed a jurisdiction over
the eastern patriarchates which was certainly not primitive,
and which these patriarchates have never honestly acknow
ledged. On the other hand, the Church of England
belonged to the Western Empire and its Christianity has
always been Latin. It broke away from the patriarchate
of Rome not at all in sympathy with the claims of Antioch
or Constantinople, but notoriously in sympathy with
German Protestantism. This revolt was based on the
same anti-Catholic and inconsistent motives as the German
Reformation — namely, greed and desire for absolute power
in princes, zeal in puritan reformers, and impatience of
moral and intellectual constraint in the body of the clergy
and laity. Nationalism, faith, learning, and Ikence were
curiously mingled in those turbid minds, and the Church of
England inherits all that indescribable spiritual confusion.

86 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

It is national in its morals and manners, mincing in its
scholarship, snobbish in its sympathies, sentimental in
its emotions. Spiritual minds in the church — of which
there are many — suffer under this heredity incubus of
worldliness ; but what can they avail ? Some join the
socialists ; a few escape to Rome ; there at least the worldli
ness, however conspicuous, is regarded as a vice and not
as a virtue. The convert will find no dearth of petty
passions, machinations, vanities, tricks, and shameless
disbelief ; but all this will be, like debauchery, a crust of
corruption, avowedly corrupt. It is dirt on the skin,
not cancer at the heart. But then the true Catholic has
made the great surrender ; he has renounced, or never
thought of maintaining, the authority of his inner man.
He is a catechumen ; his teachers will read for him the
symptoms of health or disease visible in his thoughts and
dispositions ; by their discipline — which is an ancient
science — they will help him to save his soul ; a totally
different thing from obeying the impulses or extending
the adventures of the transcendental self. The inner
man, for the Catholic as for the materialist, is only a
pathological phenomenon. Therefore the Englishman, as
I conceive him, living in and by his inner man, can never
be really a Catholic, either Anglican or Roman ; if he likes
to call himself by either name, it is equally a masquerade,
a fad like a thousand others to which the inner man, so
seriously playful, is prone to lend itself. He may go over
to Rome on a spiritual tour, as he might abscond for a
year and live in Japan with a Japanese wife ; but if he
is converted really, and becomes a Catholic at heart, for
good, and in all simplicity, then he is no longer the man
he was. Words cannot measure the chasm that must
henceforth separate him from everything at home. I
am not surprised that he recoils from so desperate a step.
It is not only the outward coarseness and laxity of Catholic
manners that offend him ; these vices are not universal,
and he would not need to share them. But for him, a
modern Englishman, with freedom and experiment and
reserve in his blood, always nursing within himself the
silent love of nature and of rebellion, to go over to Rome
is an essential suicide : the inner man must succumb first.

THE ENGLISH CHURCH 87

Such an Englishman might become a saint, but only by
becoming a foreigner.

There is another sense altogether in which the English
church might be catholic if it chose. Suppose we lay it
down as an axiom that whatever is acceptable to the inner
man is good and true, and that whatever is good and true
is Christian — Christianity would then be open to every
influence which, whilst apparently denaturalizing it, might
help to manifest -its fulness. It would cast off husk after
husk of doctrine, developing the living spirit and feeding it
with every substance which it was fitted to absorb. There
is nothing new in this process. Christianity was born of
such a marriage between the Jewish soul and the Greek.
Greek philosophy was absorbed with magnificent results ;
the restoration of Pauline theology, and the other insights
of Protestantism, led to German philosophy, which has
been absorbed too ; the sloughing off of monasticism and
ecclesiasticism have put Christianity in a position to
understand and express the modern world ; the reduction
of revelation, by the higher criticism of the Bible, to its
true place in human history, will involve a new change
of front ; and the absorption of modern science and of
democracy would complete the transformation.

To justify this method the church might appeal to an
archbishop of Canterbury who — this was in the old days —
was also a saint and a great philosopher. Saint Anselm
has a famous proof of the existence of God which runs as
follows : God exists, because God is, by definition, the
most real of beings. According to this argument, if it
should turn out that the most real of beings was matter,
it would follow that matter was God. This might be
thought a consequence drawn in mockery ; but I do not
mean to deride Saint Anselm, whom I revere, but on the
contrary to lay bare the nerve of his argument which if
the age had given him scope, and he had not been Arch
bishop of Canterbury, he might have followed to its
sublime conclusion, as Spinoza did after him. There is
a dignity in existence, in fact, in truth which to some
speculative and rapt natures absorbs and cancels every
other dignity : and on this principle the English church
might, without any sudden or distressing negation, gradu-

88 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

ally turn its worship to the most real of beings, wheresoever
it may be found ; and I presume the most real of beings
will be the whole of what is found everywhere. A narrower
conception of God might at each step give place to a wider
one ; and the church, instead of embodying one particular
revelation and striving to impose it universally through
propaganda, might become hospitable to all revelations,
and find a place for the inspirations of all ages and countries
under the aegis of its own progressive traditions. So the
religion of ancient Rome domesticated all the gods ; and
so the English language, if it should become the medium
of international intercourse, might by translation or imita
tion of other literatures or by the infiltration into it of
foreign words and styles, reafly become a vehicle for all
human ideas.

I am not sure whether one party in the English church
might not welcome such a destiny ; but at present, so far
as I can see, the tenderer and more poetical spirits in it
take quite another direction. They are trying to recover
the insights and practices of mediaeval piety ; they are
archaistic in devotion. There is a certain romance in
their decision to believe greatly, to feel mystically, to pray
perpetually. They study their attitudes, as they kneel
in some correctly restored church, hearing or intoning
some revived early chant, and wondering why they should
not choose a divine lady in heaven to be their love and
their advocate, as did the troubadours, or why they
should not have recumbent effigies of themselves carved on
their tombs, with their legs crossed, like the crusaders.
" Things,1' cried the rapturous young priest who showed
me the beautiful chapel of Pusey House, " what we need
is Things \ "

22

LEAVING CHURCH

PROTESTANT faith does not vanish into the sunlight as
Catholic faith does, but leaves a shadowy ghost haunting
the night of the soul. Faith, in the two cases, was not
faith in the same sense ; for the Catholic it was belief in a

LEAVING CHURCH 89

report or an argument ; for the Protestant it was confidence
in an allegiance. When Catholics leave the church they
do so by the south door, into the glare of the market-place,
where their eye is at once attracted by the wares displayed
in the booths, by the flower-stalls with their bright awnings,
by the fountain with its baroque Tritons blowing the
spray into the air, and the children laughing and playing
round it, by the concourse of townspeople and strangers,
and by the soldiers, perhaps, marching past ; and if they
cast a look back at the church at all, it is only to admire
its antique architecture, that crumbling filigree of stone
so poetically surviving in its incongruous setting. It is
astonishing sometimes with what contempt, with what a
complete absence of understanding, unbelievers in Catholic
countries look back on their religion. For one cultivated
mind that sees in that religion a monument to his racial
genius, a heritage of poetry and art almost as precious as
the classical heritage, which indeed it incorporated in a
hybrid form, there are twenty ignorant radicals who pass
it by apologetically, as they might the broken toys or
dusty schoolbooks of childhood. Their political animosity,
legitimate in itself, blinds their imagination, and renders
them even politically foolish ; because in their injustice
to human nature and to their national history they dis
credit their own cause, and provoke reaction.

Protestants, on the contrary, leave the church by the
north door, into the damp solitude of a green churchyard,
amid yews and weeping willows and overgrown mounds
and fallen illegible gravestones. They feel a terrible
chill ; the few weedy flowers that may struggle through
that long grass do not console them ; it was far brighter
and warmer and more decent inside. The church —
boring as the platitudes and insincerities were which you
listened to there for hours — was an edifice, something
protective, social, and human ; whereas here, in this vague
unhomely wilderness, nothing seems to await you but
discouragement and melancholy. Better the church than
the madhouse. And yet the Protestant can hardly go
back, as the Catholic does easily on occasion, out of habit,
or fatigue, or disappointment in life, or metaphysical
delusion, or the emotional weakness of the death-bed. No,

90 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

the Protestant is more in earnest, he carries his problem
and his religion within him. In his very desolation he
will find God. This has often been a cause of wonder to
me : the Protestant pious economy is so repressive and
morose and the Catholic so charitable and pagan, that I
should have expected the Catholic sometimes to sigh a
little for his Virgin and his saints, and the Protestant
to shout for joy at having got rid of his God. But the
trouble is that the poor Protestant can't get rid of his God ;
for his idea of God is a vague symbol that stands not
essentially, as with the Catholic, for a particular legendary
or theological personage, but rather for that unfathomable
influence which, if it does not make for righteousness, at
least has so far made for existence and has imposed it upon
us ; so that go through what doors you will and discard
what dogmas you choose, God will confront you still
whichever way you may turn. In this sense the en
lightened Catholic, too, in leaving the church, has merely
rediscovered God, finding him now not in the church alone,
but in the church only as an expression of human fancy,
and in human life itself only as in one out of a myriad
forms of natural existence. But the Protestant is less
clear in his gropings, the atmosphere of his inner man
is more charged with vapours, and it takes longer for the
light dubiously to break through ; and often in his wintry
day the sun sets without shining.

23
DEATH-BED MANNERS

IN all Protestant countries I have noticed a certain hush
about death, an uncomfortable secrecy, and a fear as if of
blasphemy whenever the subject threatens to come up.
Is it that hell is still felt to lie, for the vast majority,
immediately behind the curtain ? Or is it that people
have encouraged themselves to live and love as if they
were immortal, and to this lifelong bluff of theirs death
brings a contradiction which they have not the courage
to face ? Or is it simply that death is too painful, too

DEATH-BED MANNERS 91

sacred, or too unseemly for polite ears ? That a desire to
ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this
convention seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude
towards death which I have observed among English
people during this war. Some of them speak of death
quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip to
Brighton. " Oh yes, our two sons went down in the
Black Prince. They were such nice boys. Never heard a
word about them, of course ; but probably the magazine
blew up and they were all killed quite instantly, so that
we don't mind half so much as if they had had any of
those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn't have liked
it at all being crippled, you know ; and we all think it
is probably much better as it is. Just blown to atoms \
It is such a blessing ! "

Of course, the poor parents feel their hearts sink within
them in private ; but their affectation of cheerfulness has
its logic. Death is a fact ; and we had better accept it
as such as we do the weather ; perhaps, if we pretend not
to care, we really shan't care so much. The men in the
trenches and hospitals have often been bitterly unrecon
ciled and rebellious, and haunted by the cruel futility of
their sufferings : but the nursing everywhere has been
devoted and heroic : and my impression of the mourning
at home is, that it has been philosophical.

English manners are sensible and conducive to comfort
even at a death-bed. No summoning of priests, no great
concourse of friends and relations, no loud grief, no
passionate embraces and poignant farewells ; no endless
confabulations in the antechamber, no gossip about the
symptoms, the remedies, or the doctors' quarrels and
blunders ; no breathless enumeration of distinguished
visitors, letters, and telegrams ; no tearful reconciliation
of old family feuds nor whisperings about the division of
the property. Instead, either silence and closed doors, if
there is real sorrow, or more commonly only a little physical
weariness in the mourners, a little sigh or glance at one
another, as if to say : We are simply waiting for events ;
the doctors and nurses are attending to everything, and no
doubt, when the end comes, it will be for the best. In the
departing soul, too, probably dulness and indifference. No

92 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

repentance, no anxiety, no definite hopes or desires either
for this life or for the next. Perhaps old memories returning,
old loves automatically reviving ; possibly a vision, by
anticipation, of some reunion in the other world : but how
pale, how ghostly, how impotent this death-dream is ! I
seem to overhear the last words, the last thoughts of a
mother : " Dear children, you know I love you. Provision
has been made. I should be of little use to you any longer.
How pleasant to look out of that window into the park !
Be sure they don't forget to give Pup some meat with his
dog-biscuit." It is all very simple, very much repressed,
the pattering echo of daily words. Death, it is felt, is not
important. What matters is the part we have played in
the world, or may still play there by our influence. We are
not going to a melodramatic Last Judgement. We are
shrinking into ourselves, into the seed we came from, into a
long winter's sleep. Perhaps in another springtime we may
revive and come again to the light somewhere, among those
sweet flowers, those dear ones we have lost. That is God's
secret. We have tried to do right here. If there is any
Beyond, we shall try to do right there also.

24
WAR SHRINES

IN many an English village there is nowadays a calvary.
The novel object merges with wonderful ease into the
landscape, and one would almost think it had always been
there. The protecting wooden eaves have already lost
their rigidity and their varnish ; the crucifix no longer
reminds one of the shop-window from which it came ; it
does not suggest popish aggression nor the affectations of
ritualism. Flecks of sunlight play upon it familiarly, as
upon the wayside stones, and it casts its shadow across the
common like any natural tree. The flowers in the pots
before it have withered, they droop half hidden in the
ivy that has overgrown them. Even the scroll of names
has modified its official ghastliness — all those newly dead
obscure souls starkly ticketed and numbered ; the tragic

WAR SHRINES 93

page has got somewhat weather-stained and illegible, and
is curling up at the edges ; it has become a dead leaf.
Decidedly the war-shrine is at home in the scene. It is a
portion of that unspoken truth which every one carries
about with him, and the people seem again to breathe
freely under the shadow of the cross.

What does the cross signify ? We are told that Christ
died to save us, and various analogies, legal, sentimental,
or chivalrous, are put forward to make that notion accept
able. I respect the sentiments of duty and devotion which
this doctrine of legal redemption can inspire ; they express
readiness to do well, and in a certain moral sense, as Hamlet
says, the readiness is all ; yet it is a conception of religion
borrowed from ancient lawyers and rhetoricians, a sort of
celestial diplomacy. The cross can mean something else ;
it can symbolize poetically a general truth about existence
and experience. This truth is the same which the Indians
express more philosophically by saying that life is an
illusion — an expression which is itself figurative and
poetical. It is certainly not an illusion that I have now the
experience of being alive and of finding myself surrounded,
at least in appearance, by a tolerably tractable world,
material and social. It is not an illusion that this experience
is now filling me with mixed and trooping feelings. In
calling existence an illusion, the Indian sages meant that
it is fugitive and treacherous : the images and persons that
diversify it are unsubstantial, and myself the most shifting
and unsubstantial of all. The substance and fine mechanism
which I do not doubt underlie this changing apparition are
out of scale with my imagined units, and (beyond a certain
point) out of sympathy with my interests. Life is an
illusion if we trust it, but it is a truth if we do not trust it ;
and this discovery is perhaps better symbolized by the cross
than by the Indian doctrine of illusion. I will not say
that not to exist would not be better ; existence may be
condemned by the very respectable criterion of excellence
or " reality " which demands in all things permanence and
safety ; but so long as we exist, however precariously or
" unreally," I think it the part of wisdom to find a way
of living well, rather than merely to deprecate living. The
cross is certainly a most violent image, putting suffering

94 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

and death before us with a rude emphasis ; and I can
understand the preference of many for the serene Buddha,
lifting the finger of meditation and profound counsel, and
freeing the soul by the sheer force of knowledge and of
sweet reason. Nevertheless, I am not sorry to have been
born a Christian : for the soul cannot be really freed except
^by ceasing to live ; and it is whilst we still exist, not after
we are dead to existence, that we need counsel. It is there
fore the crucified spirit, not the liberated spirit, that is our
true master.

Certainly the spirit is crucified, first by being incarcerated
in the flesh at all, and then again, after it has identified
itself with the will of the flesh, by being compelled to
renounce it. Yet both this painful incarnation and this
painful redemption have something marvellously sweet
about them. The world which torments us is truly beautiful ;
indeed, that is one of its ways of tormenting us ; and we
are not wrong in loving, but only in appropriating it. The
surrender of this untenable claim to exist and to possess
the beautiful, is in its turn beautiful and good. Christ
loved the world, in an erotic sense in which Buddha did
not love it : and the world has loved the cross as it can
never love the Bo-tree. So that out of the very entangle
ments of the spirit come marvellous compensations to the
spirit, which in its liberation leave it still human and
friendly to all that it gives up. I do not at all accept the
morality of the Indians in so far as it denies the values of
illusion ; the only evil in illusion is that it deceives ; there
is beauty in its being. True insight, true mercy, is tender
and sensitive to the infinite pulsations of ignorance and
passion : it is not deceived by the prattle of the child, but
is not offended by it. The knowledge that existence can
manifest but cannot retain the good reconciles us at once
to living and to dying. That, I think, is the wisdom of the
cross.

There is a folly of the cross also, when the knowledge
or half -knowledge that life must be suffering, until it is
cleared of the love of life, erects suffering into an end in
itself, which is insane and monstrous. I suspect, however,
that in asceticism as actually preached and practised there
is less of this idolatry of suffering than the outsider imagines,

WAR SHRINES 95

who lying amid his cushions severely reproves those who
indulge in a penance. There is an asceticism which may
be loved for its simplicity, its clean poverty and cold water,
hygienic like mountain air ; but flagellations and blood and
night-long wailings are not an end in themselves ; no saint
expects to carry them with him into heaven ; at best they
are a homoeopathic cure for the lusts of the flesh. Their
purpose, if not their effect, is freedom and peace. I wish
Protestants, who find their ascetic discipline in hard work,
were equally clear about its object. From the worship of
instrumentalities, whether penitential or worldly, the cross
redeems us : in draining the cup of suffering it transcends

(suffering, and in being raised above the earth it lifts us out
of it. My instinct is to go and stand under the cross, with
the monks and the crusaders, far away from these Jews and
Protestants who adore the world and who govern it.

There is a mystical folly also among the Indians, when
they assign a positive bliss to pure Being ; this, too, is
substance-worship. Identity with substance is deemed
blessed because beneath the vicissitudes of illusion, substance
remains always solid, safe, and real. Certainly substance,
if there is such a thing, must be safe, real, and solid ; for we
understand by substance whatever is constant in change.
Hence the desire to escape from illusion and from suffering
hails a return to the indistinction of substance as a positive
salvation ; remember that you are dust, return to the
infinite from which you came, and nothing ominous can
threaten you any more, the dust and the infinite are safe.
But changeless substance, being unconscious, cannot be
blissful ; the attribution of divine bliss to it is an illusion
of contrast, and, like so much philosophy, mere rhetoric
turned into a revelation. What verbal mirage is this, to
see happiness in fixity ? Substance may be conceived
logically, and then it means pure Being ; or it may be
conceived psychologically, and then it means absorption
in the sense of pure Being ; or it may be conceived
physically as matter, a name for the constant quantities in
things that are traceably transformed into one another.
Pure Being and the contemplation of pure Being seem at
first sight very different from matter ; but they may be a
dramatic impersonation of matter, viewed from the inside,

96 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

and felt as blind intensity and solidified ignorance. No one
calls matter blessed when viewed externally, although it is
then that its best qualities, its fertility and order, come
into view : yet half mankind have fallen to worshipping
matter in envy of its internal condition, and to trying to
fall back into it, because it is the negation (and yet the
cause !) of all their troubles. The idea of an intense
nothing hypnotizes them, it is the sovereign anaesthetic ;
and they forget that this intense nothing, by its fruitfulness
in the realm of illusion, has generated all their desires,
including this desperate desire to be nothing, which turns
that nothingness, by a last illusion, into a good.

If to be saved were merely to cease, we should all be
saved by a little waiting : and I say this advisedly, without
forgetting that the Indians threaten us with reincarnation.
It is a myth to which I have no objection, because only
selfishness persuades me that if I am safe, all is well.
What difference does it make in reality whether the suffer
ing and ignominy of life fall to what I call myself or to what
I call another man ? The only trouble is that the moral
redemption which is proposed to us as a means of safety
instead of death, touches the individual only, just as death
does. Christ and Buddha are called saviours of the
world ; I think it must be in irony, for the world is just
as much in need of salvation as ever. Death and insight
and salvation are personal. The world springs up un-
regenerate every morning in spite of all the Tabors and
Calvaries of yesterday. What can save the world, without
destroying it, is self-knowledge on the part of the world,
not of course reflective self-knowledge (for the world is not
an animal that can think) but such a regimen and such a
philosophy established in society as shall recognize truly
what the world is, and what happiness is possible in it.
The force that has launched 'me into this dream of life
does not care what turns my dream takes nor how long
it troubles me. Nature denies at every moment, not
indeed that I am troubled and dreaming, but that there
are any natural units like my visions, or anything anomalous
in what I hate, or final in what I love. Under these circum
stances, what is the part of wisdom ? To dream with one
eye open ; to be detached from the world without hostility

WAR SHRINES 97

to it ; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive
sufferings without forgetting for a moment how fugitive
they are ; and not to lay up treasures, except in heaven.

How charming is divine philosophy, when it is really
divine, when it descends to earth from a higher sphere, and
loves the things of earth without needing or collecting
them ! What the gay Aristippus said of his mistress :
I possess, I am not possessed, every spirit should say of an
experience that ruffles it like a breeze playing on the
summer sea. A thousand ships sail over it in vain, and the
worst of tempests is in a teapot. This once acknowledged
and inwardly digested, life and happiness can honestly
begin. Nature is innocently fond of puffing herself out,
spreading her peacock feathers, and saying, What a fine
bird am I ! And so she is ; to rave against this vanity
would be to imitate it. On the contrary, the secret of a
merry carnival is that Lent is at hand. Having virtually
renounced our follies, we are for the first time able to
enjoy them with a free heart in their ephemeral purity.
When laughter is humble, when it is not based on self-
esteem, it is wiser than tears. Conformity is wiser than
hot denials, tolerance wiser than priggishness and
puritanism. It is not what earnest people renounce that
, .makes me pity them, it is what they work for. No possible
j, reform will make existence adorable or fundamentally
just. Modern England has worked too hard and cared
i too much ; so much tension is hysterical and degrading ;
nothing is ever gained by it worth half what it spoils.
Wealth is dismal and poverty cruel unless both are festive.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the
interval. The easier attitudes which seem more frivolous
are at bottom infinitely more spiritual and profound than
the tense attitudes ; they are nearer to understanding
and to renunciation ; they are nearer to the cross. Perhaps
if England had remained Catholic it might have remained
merry ; it might still dare, as Shakespeare dared, to be
utterly tragic and also frankly and humbly gay. The
world has been too much with it ; Hebraic religion and
German philosophy have confirmed it in a deliberate and
agonized worldliness. They have sanctioned, in the hard
working and reforming part of the middle classes, an

H

98 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

unqualified respect for prosperity and success ; life is
judged with all the blindness of life itself. There is no
moral freedom. In so far as minds are absorbed in business
or in science they all inevitably circle about the same
objects, and take part in the same events, combining their
thoughts and efforts in the same " world's work." The
world, therefore, invades and dominates them ; they lose
their independence and almost their distinction from one
another. Their philosophy accordingly only exaggerates
a little when it maintains that their individual souls are
all manifestation of a single spirit, the Earth-spirit. They
hardly have any souls they can call their own, that may
be saved out of the world, or that may see and judge the
world from above.

Death is the background of life much as empty space
is that of the stars ; it is a deeper thing always lying
behind, like the black sky behind the blue. In the realm
of existence death is indeed nothing ; only a word for
something negative and merely notional — the fact that
each life has limits in time and is absent beyond them.
But in the realm of truth, as things are eternally, life is a
little luminous meteor in an infinite abyss of nothingness,
a rocket fired on a dark night ; and to see life, and to
value it, from the point of view of death is to see and to
value it truly. The foot of the cross — I dare not say the
cross itself — is a good station from which to survey exist
ence. In the greatest griefs there is a tragic calm ; the
fury of the will is exhausted, and our thoughts rise to
another level ; as the shrill delights and the black sorrows
of childhood are impossible in old age. People sometimes
make crosses of flowers or of gold ; and I like to see the
enamelled crucifix richly surrounded with scrolls, and
encrusted with jewels ; without a touch of this pagan
instinct the religion of the cross would not be healthy nor
just. In the skirts of Mount Calvary lies the garden of
the resurrection : I do not refer to any melodramatic
resurrection, such as is pictured in Jewish and Christian
legend, but to one which actually followed quietly, sweetly,
in the light of a purer day, in the cloister, in the home, in
the regenerate mind. After renouncing the world, the soul
may find the world more amiable, and may live in it with

WAR SHRINES 99

a smile and a mystic doubt and one foot in eternity. Vanity
is innocent when recognized to be vain, and is no longer
a disgrace to the spirit. The happiness of wisdom may
at first seem autumnal, and the shadow of the cross the
shadow of death ; but it is healing shadow ; and presently,
in the hollow where the cross was set, the scent of violets
surprises us, and the crocuses peep out amongst the
thorns. The dark background which death supplies brings
out the tender colours of life in all their purity. Far be it
from me to suggest that existence is the better because
non-existence precedes and follows it ; certainly, if man
was immortal his experience could not include tradition,
parentage, childhood, love, nor old age ; nevertheless, from
the point of view of both bodily and intellectual instincts
immortality would be far better. But since, as a matter
of fact, birth and death actually occur, and our brief
career is surrounded by vacancy, it is far better to live in
the light of the tragic fact, rather than to forget or deny
it, and build everything on a fundamental lie. Death
does not say to life that life is nothing, or does not exist,
or is an illusion ; that would be wild talk, and would show
that the inspiration we had drawn from death was as little
capable of doing justice to life, as life itself is, when mindless,
of discovering death, or learning anything from it. What
the environing presence of death teaches is merely that
life has such and such limits and such and such a course,
whether it reflects on its course or not, whether it recognizes
its limits or ignores them. Death can do nothing to our
lives except to frame them in, to show them off with a
broad margin of darkness and silence ; so that to live in
the shadow of death and of the cross is to spread a large
nimbus of peace around our littleness.

25
TIPPERARY

WHAT a strange pleasure there is sometimes in seeing
what we expected, or hearing what we knew was a fact !
The dream then seems really to hold together and truth

zoo SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

to be positively true. The bells that announced the
Armistice brought me no news ; a week sooner or a week
later they had to ring. Certainly if the purpose of the
war had been conquest or victory, nobody had achieved
it ; but the purposes of things, and especially of wars,
are imputed to them rhetorically, the impulses at work
being too complicated and changeful to be easily surveyed ;
and in this case, for the French and the English, the moving
impulse had been defence ; they had been sustained through
incredible trials by the awful necessity of not yielding.
That strain had now been relaxed ; and as the conduct
of men is determined by present forces and not by future
advantages, they could have no heart to fight on. It
seemed enough to them that the wanton blow had been
parried, that the bully had begged for mercy. It was
amusing to hear him now. He said that further bloodshed
this time would be horrible ; his tender soul longed to
get home safely, to call it quits, and to take a long breath
and plan a new combination before the next bout. His
collapse had been evident for days and months ; yet
these bells that confirmed the fact were pleasant to hear.
Those mean little flags, hung out here and there by private
initiative in the streets of Oxford, had almost put on a
look of triumph ; the very sunlight and brisk autumnal
air seemed to have heard the tidings, and to invite the
world to begin to live again at ease. Certainly many a
sad figure and many a broken soul must slink henceforth
on crutches, a mere survival ; but they, too, will die off
gradually. The grass soon grows over a grave.

So musing, I suddenly heard a once familiar strain,
now long despised and out of favour, the old tune of
Tipperary. In a coffee-house frequented at that hour
some wounded officers from the hospital at Somerville
were singing it, standing near the bar ; they were breaking
all rules, both of surgeons and of epicures, and were having
champagne in the morning. And good reason they had
for it. They were reprieved, they should never have to
go back to the front, their friends — such as were left —
would all come home alive. Instinctively the old grumb
ling, good-natured, sentimental song, which they used to
sing when they first joined, came again into their minds.

TIPPERARY 101

It had been indeed a long, long way to Tipperary. But
they had trudged on and had come round full circle ;
they were in Tipperary at last.

I wonder what they think Tipperary means — for this
is a mystical song. Probably they are willing to leave it
vague, as they do their notions of honour or happiness or
heaven. Their soldiering is over ; they remember, with
a strange proud grief, their comrades who died to make
this day possible, hardly believing that it ever would
come ; they are overjoyed, yet half ashamed, to be safe
themselves ; they forget their wounds ; they see a green
vista before them, a jolly, busy, sporting, loving life in
the old familiar places. Everything will go on, they
fancy, as if nothing had happened.

Good honest unguided creatures ! They are hardly out
of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace.
/'If experience could teach mankind anything, how different
i our morals and our politics would be, how clear, how
tolerant, how steady ! If we knew ourselves, our conduct
at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent ;
and a pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect
all our passions, if we knew the world. As it is, we live
experimentally, moodily, in the dark ; each generation
breaks its egg-shell with the same haste and assurance
as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams
the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears
anything of what former men have learned by experience,
it corrects their maxims by its first impressions, and rushes
down any untrodden path which it finds alluring, to die
in its own way, or become wise too late and to no purpose.
These young men are no rustics, they are no fools ; and
yet they have passed through the most terrible ordeal,
they have seen the mad heart of this world riven and un
masked, they have had long vigils before battle, long nights
tossing with pain, in which to meditate on the spectacle ;
and yet they have learned nothing. The young barbarians
want to be again at play. If it were to be only cricket or
boating, it would be innocent enough ; but they are
going to gamble away their lives and their country, taking
their chances in the lottery of love and of business and
of politics, with a sporting chance thrown in, perhaps,

102 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

of heaven. They are going to shut out from view every
thing except their topmost instincts and easy habits, and
to trust to luck. Yet the poor fellows think they are
safe ! They think that the war — perhaps the last of all
wars — is over !

Only the dead are safe ; only the dead have seen the
end of war. Not that non-existence deserves to be called
peace ; it is only by an illusion of contrast and a pathetic
fallacy that we are tempted to call it so. The church has
a poetical and melancholy prayer, that the souls of the
faithful departed may rest in peace. If in that sigh there
lingers any fear that, when a tomb is disturbed, the un
happy ghost is doomed to walk more often abroad, the
fear is mad ; and if it merely expresses the hope that
dead men's troubles are over, the wish is superfluous ;
but perhaps we may gloss the old superstition, and read
into it the rational aspiration that all souls in other spheres,
or in the world to come upon earth, might learn to live
at peace with God and with things. That would be some
thing worth praying for, but I am afraid it is asking too
much. God — I mean the sum of all possible good — is
immutable ; to make our peace with him it is we, not
he, that must change. We should need to discover, and
to pursue singly, the happiness proper to our nature,
including the accidents of race and sex and the very real
advantages of growing old and of not living for ever ;
and we should need to respect without envying all other
forms of the good. As to the world of existence, it is
certainly fluid, and by judicious pressure we may coax
some parts of it into greater conformity with our wills ;
yet it is so vast, and crawls through such ponderous,
insidious revolutions, all so blind and so inimical to one
another, that in order to live at peace with things we
should need to acquire a marvellous plasticity, or a splendid
indifference. We should have to make peace with the fact
of war. It is the stupid obstinacy of our self-love that
produces tragedy, and makes us angry with the world.
Free life has the spirit of comedy. It rejoices in the
seasonable beauty of each new thing, and laughs at its
decay, covets no possessions, demands no agreement, and
strives to sustain nothing in being except a gallant spirit

TIPPERARY 103

of courage and truth, as each fresh adventure may re
new it.

This gallant spirit of courage and truth, you young
men had it in those early days when you first sang
Tipperary ; have you it still, I wonder, when you repeat
the song ? Some of you, no doubt. I have seen in some
of you the smile that makes light of pain, the sturdy
humility that accepts mutilation and faces disability
without repining or shame ; armless and legless men are
still God's creatures, and even if you cannot see the sun
you can bask in it, and there is joy on earth — perhaps the
deepest and most primitive joy — even in that. But others
of you, though you were driven to the war by contagious
example, or by force, are natural cowards ; you are perhaps
superior persons, intellectual snobs, and are indignant
at having been interrupted in your important studies and
made to do useless work. You are disgusted at the
stupidity of all the generals, and whatever the Govern
ment does is an outrage to your moral sense. You were
made sick at the thought of the war before you went to
it, and you are sicker of it now. You are pacifists, and you
suspect that the Germans, who were not pacifists, were
right after all. I notice you are not singing Tipperary
this morning ; you are too angry to be glad, and you
wish it to be understood that you can't endure such a
vulgar air. You are willing, however, to sip your cham
pagne with the rest ; in hospital you seem to have come
forward a little socially ; but you find the wine too dry
or too sweet, and you are making a wry face at it.

Ah, my delicate friends, if the soul of a philosopher may
venture to address you, let me whisper this counsel in your
ears : Reserve a part of your wrath ; you have not seen
the worst yet. You suppose that this war has been a
criminal blunder and an exceptional horror ; you imagine
that before long reason will prevail, and all these inferior
people that govern the world will be swept aside, and your
own party will reform everything and remain always in
office. You are mistaken. This war has given you your
first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of
the world, your first taste of reality. It should teach you
to dismiss all your philosophies of progress or of a governing

104 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

reason as the babble of dreamers who walk through one
world mentally beholding another. I don't mean that you
or they are fools ; heaven forbid. You have too much
mind. It is easy to behave very much like other people
and yet be possessed inwardly by a narcotic dream. I am
sure the flowers — and you resemble flowers yourselves,
though a bit wilted — if they speculate at all, construct
idealisms which, like your own, express their inner sensi
bility and their experience of the weather, without much
resemblance to the world at large. Their thoughts, like
yours, are all positings and deductions and asseverations
of what ought to be, whilst the calm truth is marching on
unheeded outside. No great harm ensues, because the
flowers are rooted in their places and adjusted to the
prevailing climate. It doesn't matter what they think.
You, too, in your lodgings in Chelsea, quite as in Lhassa or
in Mount Athos, may live and die happy in your painted
cells. It is the primitive and the ultimate office of the
mind to supply such a sanctuary. But if you are ever
driven again into the open, if the course of events should
be so rapid, that you could catch the drift of it in your
short life (since you despise tradition), then you must
prepare for a ruder shock. There is eternal war in nature,
a war in which every cause is ultimately lost and every
nation destroyed. War is but resisted change ; and change
must needs be resisted so long as the organism it would
destroy retains any vitality. Peace itself means discipline
at home and invulnerability abroad — two forms of perma
nent virtual war ; peace requires so vigorous an internal
regimen that every germ of dissolution or infection
shall be repelled before it reaches the public soul. This
war has been a short one, and its ravages slight in
comparison with what remains standing : a severe war is
one in which the entire manhood of a nation is destroyed,
its cities razed, and its women and children driven into
slavery. In this instance the slaughter has been greater,
perhaps, only because modern populations are so enormous ;
the disturbance has been acute only because the modern
industrial system is so dangerously complex and unstable ;
and the expense seems prodigious because we were so
extravagantly rich. Our society was a sleepy glutton who

TIPPERARY 105

thought himself immortal and squealed inexpressibly, like
a stuck pig, at the first prick of the sword. An ancient city
would have thought this war, or one relatively as costly,
only a normal incident ; and certainly the Germans will
not regard it otherwise.

Existence, being a perpetual generation, involves as
piration, and its aspiration envelops it in an atmosphere
of light, the joy and the beauty of being, which is the living
heaven ; but for the same reason existence, in its texture,
involves a perpetual and a living hell — the conflict and
mutual hatred of its parts, each endeavouring to devour ,
its neighbour's substance in the vain effort to live for ever. /
Now, the greater part of most men's souls dwells in this
hell, and ends there. One of their chief torments is the
desire to live without dying — continual death being a part
of the only possible and happy life. We wish to exist
materially, and yet resent the plastic stress, the very force
of material being, which is daily creating and destroying
us. Certainly war is hell, as you, my fair friends, are fond
of repeating ; but so is rebellion against war. To live well
you must be victorious. It is with war as with the passion
of love, which is a war of another kind : war at first against
the beloved for favour and possession ; war afterwards
against the rest of the world for the beloved's sake. Often
love, too, is a torment and shameful ; but it has its laughing
triumphs, and the attempt to eliminate it is a worse torture,
and more degrading. When was a coward at peace ?
Homer, who was a poet of war, did not disguise its horrors
nor its havoc, but he knew it was the shield of such happiness
as is possible on earth. If Hector had not scoured the plain
in his chariot, Paris could not have piped upon the slopes
of Ida, nor sported with his sheep and his goddesses upon
the green. The merchants of Crete or Phoenicia could not
have drawn up their black keels upon the beach, if the high
walls of Ilium had not cast their protecting shadow on their
bales of merchandise, their bags of coin, and their noisy
bargaining. When Hector was no more and the walls were
a heap of dust, all the uses of peace vanished also : ruin
and utter meanness came to inhabit that land, and still
inhabit it. Nor is war, which makes peace possible, without
occasions in which a free spirit, not too much attached to

106 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

existence, may come into its own. Homer shows us how
his heroes could gather even from battle a certain harvest
of tenderness and nobility, and how above their heads, half
seen through the clouds of dust and of pain, flew the winged
chariots of the gods, and music mingled with their banquet.
Be sad if you will, there is always reason for sadness,
since the good which the world brings forth is so fugitive
and bought at so great a price ; but be brave. If you
think happiness worth enjoying, think it worth defending.
Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the
readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility ; life
would not be worth having without the freedom of soul and
the friendship with nature which that readiness brings.
The things we know and love on earth are, and should be,
transitory ; they are, as were the things celebrated by
Homer, at best the song or oracle by which heaven is
revealed in our time. We must pass with them into eternity,
not in the end only but continually, as a phrase passes into
its meaning ; and since they are part of us and we of them,
we should accompany them with a good grace : it would
be desolation to survive. The eternal is always present,
as the flux of time in one sense never is, since it is all
either past or future ; but this elusive existence in passing
sets before the spirit essences in which spirit rests, and
which can never vary ; as a dramatic poet creates a
character which many an actor afterwards on many a
night may try to enact. Of course the flux of matter
carries the poets away too ; they become old-fashioned,
and nobody wishes any longer to play their characters ;
but each age has its own gods. Time is like an enterprising
manager always bent on staging some new and surprising
production, without knowing very well what it will be.
Our good mother Psyche, who is a convolution of this
material flux, breeds us accordingly to mindlessness and
anxiety, out of which it is hard for our youthful intellect
to wean itself to peace, by escaping into the essential
eternity of everything it sees and loves. So long as the
world goes round we shall see Tipperary only, as it were,
out of the window of our troop-train. Your heart and
mine may remain there, but it's a long, long way that the
world has to go.

SKYLARKS 107

26
SKYLARKS

THERE is a poet in every nice Englishman ; there is a
little fund of free vitality deep down in him which the
exigencies of his life do not tap and which no art at his
command can render articulate. He is able to draw upon
it, and to drink in the refreshment and joy of inner freedom,
only in silent or religious moments. He feels he is never
so much himself as when he has shed for the time being
all his ordinary preoccupations. That is why his religion
is so thin or (as he might say) so pure : it has no relevance
to any particular passions or events ; a featureless back
ground, distant and restful, like a pale clear sky. That is
why he loves nature, and country life, and hates towns and
vulgar people ; those he likes he conceives emasculated,
sentimentalized, and robed in white. The silent poet
within him is only a lyric poet. When he returns from
those draughts of rare and abstract happiness, he would
find it hard to reconcile himself to the world, or to himself,
did he not view both through a veil of convention and
make-believe ; he could not be honest about himself and
retain his self-respect ; he could not be clear about other
people and remain kind. Yet to be kind to all, and true
to his inner man, is his profound desire ; because even if
life, in its unvarnished truth, is a gross medley and a cruel
business, it is redeemed for him, nevertheless, by the perfect
beauty of soul that here and there may shine through it.
Hamlet is the classic version of this imprisoned spirit ; the
skylark seems a symbol of what it would be in its freedom.
Poor larks ! Is the proportion of dull matter in their
bodies, I wonder, really less than in ours ? Must they not
find food and rear their young ? Must they not in their
measure work, watch, and tremble ? Cold, hunger, and
disease probably beset them more often and more bitterly
than they do most of us. But we think of them selfishly,
as of actors on the stage, only in the character they wear
when they attract our attention. As we walk through the
fields we stop to watch and to listen to them performing in
the sky, and never think of their home troubles ; which

io8 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

they, too, seem for the moment to have eluded ; at least
they have energy and time enough left over from those
troubles for all this luxury of song. It is this glorious if
temporary emancipation, this absolute defiant emphasis
laid with so much sweetness on the inner life that the poet
in every nice Englishman loves in the lark ; it seems to
reveal a brother-spirit more fortunate than oneself, almost
a master and a guide.

Larks made even Shelley envious, although no man
ever had less reason to envy them for their gift, either in
its rapture or in its abstraction. Even the outer circum
stances of Shelley's life were very favourable to inspiration
and left him free to warble as much and as ardently as he
chose ; but perhaps he was somewhat deceived by the
pathos of distance and fancied that in Nephelococcygia
bad birds and wicked traditions were less tyrannous than
in parliamentary England. He seems to have thought that
human nature was not really made for puddings and port
wine and hunting and elections, nor even for rollicking at
universities and reading Greek, but only for innocent
lyrical ecstasies and fiery convictions that nevertheless
should somehow not render people covetous or jealous or
cruelly disposed, nor constrain them to prevent any one
from doing anything that any one might choose to do.
Perhaps in truth the cloisters of Oxford and the streets of
London are quite as propitious to the flights of which
human nature is really capable as English fields are to the
flights of larks ; there is food in them for thought. But
j Shelley was impatient of human nature ; he was horrified
to find that society is a web of merciless ambitions and
jealousies, mitigated by a quite subsidiary kindness ; he
forgot that human life is precarious and that its only
weapon against circumstances, and against rival men, is
intelligent action, intelligent war. The case is not other
wise with larks, on the fundamental earthly side of their
existence ; yet because their flight is bodily, because it is
a festive outpouring of animal vitality, not of art or
reflection, it suggests to us a total freedom of the inner
man, a freedom which is impossible.

In the flight of larks, however, by a rare favour of
fortune, all seems to be spontaneity, courage, and trust,

SKYLARKS 109

even within this material sphere ; nothing seems to be
adjustment or observation. Their life in the air is a sort
of intoxication of innocence and happiness in the blind
pulses of existence. They are voices of the morning,
young hearts seeking experience and not remembering
it ; when they seem to sob they are only catching their
breath. They spring from the ground as impetuously
as a rocket or the jet of a fountain, that bursts into a
shower of sparks or of dew-drops ; they circle as they rise,
soaring through veil after veil of luminous air, or dropping
from level to level. Their song is like the gurgling of
little rills of water, perpetual through its delicate variations,
and throbbing with a changed volume at every change in
the breeze. Their rapture seems to us seraphic, not merely
because it descends to us invisibly from a luminous height,
straining our eyes and necks — in itself a cheap sublimity —
but rather because the lark sings so absolutely for the mad
sake of singing. He is evidently making high holiday,
spending his whole strength on something ultimate and
utterly useless, a momentary entrancing pleasure which
(being useless and ultimate) is very like an act of worship
or of sacrifice. Sheer life in him has become pure. That
is what we envy ; that is what causes us, as we listen, to
draw a deeper breath, and perhaps something like tears to
come to our eyes. He seems so triumphantly to attain
what all our labours end by missing, yet what alone would
justify them : happiness, selflessness, a moment of life
lived in the spirit. And we may be tempted to say to
ourselves : Ah, if I could only forget, if I could cease to
look before and after, if the pale cast of thought did not
make a slave of me, as well as a coward !

Vital raptures such as the lark's are indeed not unknown
even to man, and the suggestion of them powerfully allures
the Englishman, being as he is a youth morally, still
impelled to sport, still confident of carrying his whole
self forward into some sort of heaven, whether in love,
in politics, or in religion, without resigning to nature the
things that are nature's nor hiding in God the things that
are God's. Alas, a sad lesson awaits him, if he ever grows
old enough to learn it. Vital raptures, unless long training
or a miracle of adaptation has antecedently harmonized

no SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

them with the whole orchestration of nature, necessarily
come to a bad end. Dancing and singing and love and
sport and religious enthusiasm are mighty ferments :
happy he who vents them in their season. But if ever
they are turned into duties, pumped up by force, or made
the basis of anything serious, like morals or science, they
become vicious. The wild breath of inspiration is gone
which hurried them across the soul like a bright cloud.
Inspiration, as we may read in Plato between the lines,
inspiration is animal. It comes from the depths, from that
hearth of Hestia, the Earth-Mother, which conservative
pagans could not help venerating as divine. Only art
and reason, however, are divine in a moral sense, not
because they are less natural than inspiration (for the
Earth-Mother with her seeds and vapours is the root of
everything) but because they mount towards the ultimate
heaven of order, beauty, intellectual light, and the achieve
ment of eternal dignities. In that dimension of being
even featherless bipeds can soar and sing with a good
grace. But space is not their element ; airmen, now
that we have them, are only a new sort of sailor. They
fly for the sake of danger and of high wages ; it is a boyish
art, with its romantic glamour soon tarnished, and only a
material reward left for all its skill and hardships. The
only sublimity possible to man is intellectual ; when he
1 would be sublime in any other dimension he is merely
'fatuous and bombastic. By intelligence, so far as he
possesses it, a man sees things as they are, transcends
his senses and his passions, uproots himself from his casual
station in space and time, sees all things future as if they
were past, and all things past as for ever present, at once
condemns and forgives himself, renounces the world and
loves it. Having this inner avenue open to divinity, he
would be a fool to emulate the larks in their kind of ecstasy.
His wings are his intelligence ; not that they bring ulti
mate success to his animal will, which must end in failure,
but that they lift his failure itself into an atmosphere of
laughter and light, where is his proper happiness. He
cannot take his fine flight, like the lark, in the morning,
in mad youth, in some irresponsible burst of vitality,
because life is impatient to begin : that sort of thing is

SKYLARKS in

the fluttering of a caged bird, a rebellion against circum
stance and against commonness which is a sign of spirit,
but not spirit in its self-possession, not happiness nor a
school of happiness. The thought which crowns life at
its summit can accompany it throughout its course, and
can reconcile us to its issue. Intelligence is Homeric in
its pervasive light. It traces all the business of nature,
eluding but not disturbing it, rendering it in fact more
amiable than it is, and rescuing it from vanity.

Sense is like a lively child always at our elbow, saying,
Look, look, what is that ? Will is like an orator, indignantly
demanding something different. History and fiction and
religion are like poets, continually recomposing the facts
into some tragic unity which is not in them. All these
forms of mind are spiritual, and therefore materially
superfluous and free ; but their spirit is pious, it is attentive
to its sources, and therefore seems to be care-laden and
not so gloriously emancipated as the music of larks, or
even of human musicians ; yet thought is pure music in
its essence, and only in its subject-matter retrospective
and troubled about the facts. It must indeed be troubled
about them, because in man spirit is not a mere truant,
as it seems to be in the lark, but is a faithful chronicler of
labour and wisdom. Man is hard-pressed ; long truancies
would be fatal to him. He is tempted to indulge in them
— witness his languages and pyramids and mythologies ;
yet his margin of safety is comparatively narrow, and he
cannot afford to spend such relatively prodigious amounts
of energy in mere play as the lark does with a light heart
and in the grand manner. There are words to man's
music ; he gives names to things ; he tries to catch the
rhythm of his own story, or to imagine it richer and more
sublime than it is. His festivals are heavy with pathos ;
they mark the events on which his existence turns —
harvests, funerals, redemptions, wooings, and wars,,
When he disregards all these tiresome things, he becomes
a fop or a fanatic. There is no worthy transport for him
except sane philosophy — a commentary, not a dream.
His intelligence is most intense and triumphant when
there is least waste in his life ; for if hard thinking some
times makes the head ache, it is because it comes hard,

H2 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

not because it is thinking ; our fuddled brain grates and
repeats itself in that it can't think. But if your business
is in order, it requires no further pains to understand it.
Intelligence is the flower of war and the flower of love.
Both, in the end, are comprehension. How miraculously
in our happy moments we understand, how far we jump,
what masses of facts we dominate at a glance ! There is
no labour then, no friction or groping, no anxious jostling
against what we do not know, but only joy in this intricate
outspread humorous world, intoxication as ethereal as the
lark's, but more descriptive. If his song is raised above
the world for a moment by its wantonness and idle rapture,
ours is raised above it essentially by its scope. To look
before and after is human ; it would not be sincere nor
manly in us not to take thought for the morrow and not to
pine for what is not. We must start on that basis, with
our human vitality (which is art) substituted for the
vegetative prayerfulness of the lily, and our human scope
(which is knowledge of the world) substituted for the
outpourings of larks.

On this other plane we could easily be as happy as the
larks, if we were as liberal. Men when they are civilized
and at ease are liberal enough in their sports, and willing
to desipere in loco, like kittens, but it is strange how
barbarous and illiberal, at least in modern times, they
have remained about thought. They wish to harness
thought like a waterfall, or like the blind Samson, to
work for them night and day, in the treadmill of their
interests or of their orthodoxy. Fie upon their stupidity
and upon their slavishness ! They do not see that when
nature, with much travail, brings something living to
birth, inevitable thought is there already, and gratis,
and cannot possibly be there before. The seething of the
brain is indeed as pragmatic as the habit of singing and
flying, which in its inception doubtless helped the larks to
survive, as even the whiteness of the lily may have done
through the ministry of insects which it attracted ; but
even material organs are bound to utility by a very loose
tie. Nature does not shake off her baroque ornaments
and her vices until they prove fatal, and she never thinks
of the most obvious invention or pressing reform, until

SKYLARKS 113

some complication brings her, she knows not how, to try
the experiment. Nature, having no ulterior purpose, has
no need of parsimony or haste or simplicity. Much less
need she be niggardly of spirit, which lays no tax upon
her, and consumes no energy, but laughs aloud, a marvel
and a mystery to her, in her very heart. All animal
functions, whether helpful or wasteful, have this fourth
dimension in the realm of spirit — the joy, or the pain, or
the beauty that may be found in them. Spirit loads with
a lyric intensity the flying moment in which it lives. It
actually paints the lily and casts a perfume on the violet ;
it turns into vivid presences a thousand forms which,
until its flame lighted them up, were merged in the passive
order and truth of things, like the charms of Lucy by the
springs of Dove, before Wordsworth discovered them.
The smile of nature is not ponderable ; and the changing
harmonies of nature, out of which spirit springs, are like
the conjunctions or eclipses of planets, facts obvious
enough to sense in their specious simplicity, yet materially
only momentary positions of transit for wayfarers bound
each on his own errand. The songs of larks are like shooting
stars that drop downwards and vanish ; human intelligence
is a part of the steadier music of the spheres.

27
AT HEAVEN'S GATE

SKYLARKS, if they exist elsewhere, must be homesick for
England. They need these kindly mists to hide and to
sustain them. Their flexible throats would soon be
parched, far from these vaporous meadows and hedgerows
rich in berries and loam. How should they live in arid
tablelands, or at merciless altitudes, where there is nothing
but scorching heat or a freezing blizzard ? What space
could they find for solitude and freedom in the tangle
of tropical forests, amongst the monkeys and parrots ?
What reserve, what tenderness, what inward springs of
happiness could they treasure amid those gross harlot-like
flowers ? No, they are the hermits of this mild atmosphere,
fled to its wilderness of gentle light. Well may they leave

I

H4 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

it to eagles to rush against the naked sun, as if its round
eye challenged them to single combat : not theirs the stupid
ferocity of passion against fact, anger against light, swift
ness against poise, beak and talons against intangible fire.
Larks may not be very clever, but they are not so foolish
as to be proud, or to scream hoarsely against the nature
of things. Having wings and voluble throats they play
with them for pure pleasure ; they are little artists and little
gentlemen ; they disdain to employ their faculties for their
mere utility, or only in order to pounce down to the earth,
whenever they spy a dainty morsel, or to return to sulk
shivering on some solitary crag, their voracity but half
appeased, like eagles dreaming of their next victim. Of
course, even the most playful songster must eat, and
skylarks no doubt keep an eye open for worms, and their
nest calls them back to terrene affections ; but they are as
forgetful of earth as they can be, and insatiable craving
does not stamp itself on their bent necks, as if they were
vultures, nor strain their feathers of iron. No more are
they inspired by sentimental pangs and love-sick like the
nightingale ; they do not hide in the labyrinthine shade
of ilex or cypress, from there to wail in the melancholy
moonlight, as it were a seductive serenade addressed to
mortal lovers. No, the trilling of larks is not for mankind.
Like English poets they sing to themselves of nature, in
articulately happy in a bath of light and freedom, sporting
for the sake of sport, turning what doubts they may have
into sweetness, not asking to see or to know anything
ulterior. They must needs drink the dew amongst these
English fields, peeping into the dark little hearts and
flushed petals of these daisies, like the heart and cheeks
of an English child, or into these buttercups, yellow like
his Saxon hair. They could hardly have built their nests
far from this maze of little streams, or from these narrow
dykes and ditches, arched with the scented tracery of
limes and willows. They needed this long, dull, chilly
winter in which to gather their unsuspected fund of yearn
ing and readiness for joy ; so that when high summer
comes at last they may mount with virgin confidence and
ardour through these sunlit spaces, to pour their souls out
at heaven's gate.

AT HEAVEN'S GATE 115

At heaven's gate, but not in heaven. The sky, as these
larks rise higher and higher, grows colder and thinner ;
if they could rise high enough, it would be a black void.
All this fluid and dazzling atmosphere is but the drapery
of earth ; this cerulean vault is only a film round the
oceans. As these choristers pass beyond the nether veils
of air, the sun becomes fierce and comfortless ; they
freeze and are dazzled ; they must hurry home again to
earth if they would live. They must put fuel in their
little engines : after all it was flesh and blood in them that
were praising the Lord. And accordingly, down they
drop to their nests and peck about, anxious and silent ;
but their song never comes down. Up there they leave
it, in the glittering desert it once ravished, in what we
call the past. They bore their glad offering to the gate
and returned empty ; but the gladness of it, which in their
palpitation and hurry they only half guessed, passed in
and is a part of heaven. In the home of all good, from
which their frail souls fetched it for a moment, it is
still audible for any ear that ever again can attune
itself to that measure. All that was loved or beautiful
at any time, or that shall be so hereafter, all that
never was but that ought to have been, lives in that
paradise, in the brilliant treasure-house of the gods.

How many an English spirit, too modest to be heard
here, has now committed its secret to that same heaven !
Caught by the impulse of the hour, they rose like larks in
the morning, cheerily, rashly, to meet the unforeseen,
fatal, congenial adventure, the goal not seen, the air not
measured, but the firm heart steady through the fog or
blinding fire, making the best of what came, trembling
but ready for what might come, with a simple courage
which was half joy in living and half willingness to die.
Their first flight was often their last. What fell to earth
was only a poor dead body, one of a million ; what
remained above perhaps nothing to speak of, some boyish
sally or wistful fancy, less than the song of a lark for God
to treasure up in his omniscience and eternity. Yet these
common brave fools knew as well as the lark the thing that
they could do, and did it ; and of other gifts and other
adventures they were not envious. Boys and free men are

n6 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

always a little inclined to flout what is not the goal of their
present desires, or is beyond their present scope ; spontaneity
in them has its ebb -flow in mockery. Their tight little
selves are too vigorous and too clearly determined to
brood much upon distant things ; but they are true to
their own nature, they know and love the sources of their
own strength. Like the larks, those English boys had drunk
here the quintessence of many a sunlit morning ; they
had rambled through these same fields, fringed with hedges
and peeping copse and downs purple with heather ; these
paths and streams had enticed them often ; they had been
vaguely happy in these quiet, habitable places. It was
enough for them to live, as for nature to revolve ; and
fate, in draining in one draught the modest cup of their
spirit, spared them the weary dilution and waste of it in
the world. The length of things is vanity, only their
height is joy.

Of myself also I would keep nothing but what God may
keep of me — some lovely essence, mine for a moment in
that I beheld it, some object of devout love enshrined where
all other hearts that have a like intelligence of love in their
day may worship it ; but my loves themselves and my
reasonings are but a flutter of feathers weaker than a
lark's, a prattle idler than his warblings, happy enough if
they too may fly with him and die with him at the gate of
heaven.

LATER SOLILOQUIES

1918-1921

117

28

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE

0 solitudo, sola beatitudo, Saint Bernard said ; but might
he not have said just as well, 0 societas, sola felicitas ?
Just as truly, I think ; because when a man says that the
only happiness is this or that, he is like a lover saying
that Mary Jane is the one woman in the world. She may
be truly the one woman for him, though even that is not
probable ; but he cannot mean to assert that she is the
only woman living, nor to deny that each of the others
might be the one woman for somebody. Now, when a
Hegelian philosopher, contradicting Saint Bernard, says
that society is his be-all and end-all, that he himself is
nothing but an invisible point at which relations cross,
and that if you removed from him his connection with
Hegel, with his university, his church, his wife, and his
publishers, there would be nothing left, or at best a name
and a peg to hang a gown on, far be it from me to revise
his own analysis of his nature ; society may be the only
felicity and the only reality for him. But that cannot
annul the judgement of Saint Bernard. He had a great
mind and a great heart, and he knew society well ; at
least, he accepted the verdict which antiquity had passed
on society, after a very long, brilliant, and hearty experience
of it ; and he knew the religious life and solitude as well ;
and I can't help thinking that he, too, must have been
right in his self-knowledge, and that solitude must have
been the only happiness for him.

Nevertheless, the matter is not limited to this confronting
of divers honest judgements, or confessions of moral
experience. The natures expressed in these judgements
have a long history, and are on different levels ; the one

119

120 LATER SOLILOQUIES

may be derived from the other. Thus it is evident that the
beatific solitude of Saint Bernard was filled with a kind of
society ; he devoted it to communion with the Trinity, or
to composing fervent compliments to the Virgin Mary. It
was only the society to be found in inns and hovels, in
castles, sacristies, and refectories, that he thought it
happiness to avoid. That the wilderness to which hermits
flee must be peopled by their fancy, could have been
foreseen by any observer of human nature. Tormenting
demons or ministering angels must needs appear, because
man is rooted in society and his instincts are addressed to
it ; for the first nine months, or even years, of his existence
he is a parasite ; and scarcely are these parental bonds a
little relaxed, when he instinctively forms other ties, that
turn him into_ a husband and father, and keep him such
all his days, j If ever he finds happiness in solitude, it can
only be by lavishing on objects of his imagination the
attentions which his social functions require that he should
lavish on something. Without exercising these faculties
somehow his nature would be paralysed ; there would be
no fuel to feed a spiritual flame. All Saint Bernard could
mean, then, is that happiness lies in this substitution of
an ideal for a natural society, in converse with thoughts
rather than with things. Such a substitution is normal,
and a mark of moral vigour ; we must not be misled into
comparing it with a love of dolls or of lap-dogs. Dolls are
not impersonal, and lap-dogs are not ideas : they are only
less rebellious specimens of the genus thing ; they are
more portable idols. To substitute the society of ideas
for that of things is simply to live in the mind ; it is to
survey the world of existences in its truth and beauty
rather than in its personal perspectives, or with practical
urgency. It is the sole path to happiness for the intellectual
man, because the intellectual man cannot be satisfied with
a world of perpetual change, defeat, and imperfection.? It
is the path trodden by ancient philosophers and modern
saints or poets ; not, of course, by modern writers on philo
sophy (except Spinoza), because these have not been
philosophers in the vital sense ; they have practised no
spiritual discipline, suffered no change of heart, but lived
on exactly like other professors, and exerted themselves

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 121

to prove the existence of a God favourable to their own
desires, instead of searching for the God that happens to
exist. Certainly this path, in its beginnings, is arduous,
and leaves the natural man somewhat spare and haggard ;
he seems to himself to have fasted for forty days and forty
nights, and the world regards his way of living afterwards
as rather ghostly and poor. But he usually congratulates
himself upon it in the end ; and of those who persevere
some become saints and some poets and some philosophers.

Yet why, we may ask, should happiness be found
exclusively in this ideal society where none intrudes ?
If the intellectual man cannot lay up his treasures in a
world of change, the natural man can perfectly well
satisfy his instincts within it ; and why shouldn't the
two live amicably together in a house of two stories ?
I can see no essential reason ; but historically natural
society long ago proved a moral failure. It could not
harmonize nor decently satisfy even the instincts on which
it rests. Hence the philosophers have felt bound not only
to build themselves a superstructure but to quit the
ground floor — materially, if possible, by leading a monastic
life, religiously in any case by not expecting to find much
except weeping and wailing in this vale of tears. We may
tax this despair with being premature, and call such a
flight into an imaginary world a desperate expedient ;
at any time the attempts of the natural man to live his
comic life happily may be renewed, and may succeed.
Solitude peopled with ideas might still remain to employ
the mind ; but it would not be the only beatitude.

Yet the insecurity of natural society runs deeper, for
natural society itself is an expedient and a sort of refuge
of despair. It, too, in its inception, seemed a sacrifice and
a censtraint. The primitive soul hates order and the
happiness founded on order. The barbarous soul hates
justice and peace. The belly is always rebelling against
the members. The belly was once all in all ; it was a
single cell floating deliriously in a warm liquid ; it had
no outer organs ; it thought it didn't need them. It
vegetated in peace ; no noises, no alarms, no lusts, no
nonsense. Ah, veritably solitude was blessedness then !
But it was a specious solitude and a precarious blessedness,

122 LATER SOLILOQUIES

resting on ignorance. The warm liquid might cool, or might
dry up ; it might breed all sorts of enemies ; presently
heaven might crack and the cell be cleft in two. Happy
the hooded microbe that put forth feelers in time, and
awoke to its social or unsocial environment ! I am not
sure that, beneath the love of ideal society, there was not
in Saint Bernard j a lingering love of primeval peace, of
seminal slumber ; that he did not yearn for the cell bio
logical as well as for the cell monastic. Life, mere living,
is a profound ideal, pregnant with the memory of a possible
happiness, the happiness of protoplasmj; and the advocate
of moral society must not reckon without his host. He has
a rebellious material in hand ; his every atom is instinct
with a life of its own which it may reassert, upsetting his
calculations and destroying his organic systems. Only the
physical failure of solitude drove the spirit at first into
society, as the moral failure of society may drive it later
into solitude again. If any one said, then, that happiness
lies only in society, his maxim would be no less sincere and
solid than Saint Bernard's, but it would not be so profound.
For beneath natural society, in the heart of each of its
members, there is always an intense and jealous solitude,
the sleep of elemental life which can never be wholly broken ;
and above natural society there is always another solitude
— a placid ethereal wilderness, the heaven of ideas —
beckoning the mind.

29
IMAGINATION

| MEN are ruled by imagination : imagination makes them
into men, capable of madness and of immense labours.
We work dreaming, j Consider what dreams must have
dominated the builders of the Pyramids — dreams geometri
cal, dreams funereal, dreams of resurrection, dreams of
outdoing the pyramid of some other Pharaoh ! What
dreams occupy that fat man in the street, toddling by
under his shabby hat and bedraggled rain-coat ? Perhaps
he is in love ; perhaps he is a Catholic, and imagines
that early this morning he has partaken of the body and

IMAGINATION 123

blood of Christ ; perhaps he is a revolutionist, with the
millennium in his heart and a bomb in his pocket. The
spirit bloweth where it listeth ; the wind of inspiration
carries our dreams before it and constantly refashions them
like clouds. Nothing could be madder, more irresponsible,
more dangerous than this guidance of men by dreams.
What saves us is the fact that our imaginations, groundless
and chimerical as they may seem, are secretly suggested
and controlled by shrewd old instincts of our animal
nature, and by continual contact with things. The shock
of sense, breaking in upon us with a fresh irresistible image,
checks wayward imagination and sends it rebounding in a
new direction, perhaps more relevant to what is happening
in the world outside.

When I speak of being governed by imagination, of
course I am indulging in a figure of speech, in an ellipsis ;
in reality we are governed by that perpetual latent process
within us by which imagination itself is created. Actual
imaginings — the cloud-like thoughts drifting by — are not
masters over themselves nor over anything else. They are
like the sound of chimes in the night ; they know nothing
of whence they came, how they will fall out, or how long
they will ring. There is a mechanism in the church tower ;
there was a theme in the composer's head ; there is a
beadle who has been winding the thing up. jThe sound
wafted to us, muffled by distance and a thousand obstacles,
is but the last lost emanation of this magical bell-ringing. |
Yet in our dream it is all in all ; it is what first entertains
and absorbs the mind. Imagination, when it chimes within
us, apparently of itself, is no less elaborately grounded ; it
is a last symptom, a rolling echo, by which we detect and
name the obscure operation that occasions it ; and not
this echo in its aesthetic impotence, but the whole operation
whose last witness it is, receives in science the name of
imagination, and may be truly said to rule the human world.

This extension of names is inevitable although unfortu
nate, because language and perception are poetical before
they become scientific, if they ever do ; as Aristotle
observes that the word anger is used indifferently for two
different things : dialectically, or as I call it, imaginatively,
for the desire for revenge, but physically for a boiling of

124 LATER SOLILOQUIES

the humours. And utterly different as these two things
are in quality, no great inconvenience results from giving
them the same name, because historically they are parts
of the same event. Nature has many dimensions at once,
and whenever we see anything happen, much else is happen
ing there which we cannot see. Whilst dreams entertain us,
the balance of our character is shifting beneath : we are
growing while we sleep. The young think in one way, the
drunken in another, and the dead not at all ; and I
imagine — for I have imagination myself — that they do not
die because they stop thinking, but they stop thinking
because they die. How much veering and luffing before
they make that port ! JThe brain of man, William James
used to say, has a hair-trigger organization. His life is
terribly experimental. He is perilously dependent on the
oscillations of a living^ needle, imagination, that never
points to the true north]

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments
scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more
interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.
The reciprocal interference of magnetic fields (which I
understand is the latest conception of matter) may compose
a marvellous moving pattern ; but the chief interest to us
of matter lies in its fertility in producing minds and present
ing recognizable phenomena to the senses ; and the chief
interest of any scientific notion of its intrinsic nature lies
in the fact that, if not literally true, it may liberate us from
more misleading conceptions. Did we have nothing but
electrical physics to think of, the nightmare would soon
become intolerable. But a hint of that kind, like a hasty
glance into the crater of a volcano, sends a wholesome
shudder through our nerves ; we realize how thin is the
crust we build on, how mythical and remote from the
minute and gigantic scale of nature are the bright images
we seem to move among, all cut out and fitted to our
human stature. Yet these bright images are our natural
companions, and if we do not worship them idolatrously
nor petrify them into substances, forgetting the nimble
use of them in mental discourse, which is where they
belong, they need not be more misleading to us, even for
scientific purposes, than are words or any other symbols.

IMAGINATION 125

It is fortunate that the material world, whatever may
be its intrinsic structure or substance, falls to our appre
hension into such charming units. There is the blue vault
of heaven, there are the twinkling constellations, there are
the mountains, trees, and rivers, and above all those
fascinating unstable unities which we call animals and
persons ; magnetic fields I am quite ready to believe them,
for such in a vast vague way I feel them to be, but
individual bodies they will remain to my sensuous imagina
tion, and dramatic personages to my moral sense. They,
too, are animate : they, too, compose a running commentary
on things and on one another, adding their salacious
footnotes to the dull black letter of the world. Many of
them are hardly aware of their own wit ; knowing they
are but commentators, they are intent on fidelity and
unconscious of invention. Yet against their will they gloss
everything, willy-nilly we are all scholiasts together.
Heaven forbid that I should depreciate this prodigious
tome of nature, or question in one jot or tittle the absolute
authority of its Author ; but it is like an encyclopaedia in
an infinite number of volumes, or a directory with the
addresses of everybody that ever lived. We may dip into
it on occasion in search of some pertinent fact, but it is
not a book to read ; its wealth is infinite, but so is its
monotony ; it is not composed in our style nor in our
language, we could not have written one line of it. Yet
the briefest text invites reflection, and we may spin a little
homily out of it in the vernacular for our own edification.

In the Mahabharata, a learned friend tells me, a young
champion armed for the combat and about to rush forward
between the two armies drawn up in battle array, stops for
a moment to receive a word of counsel from his spiritual
adviser — and that word occupies the next eighteen books
of the epic ; after which the battle is allowed to proceed.
These Indian poets had spiritual minds, they measured
things by their importance to the spirit, not to the eye.
They despised verisimilitude and aesthetic proportion ;
they despised existence, the beauties of which they felt
exquisitely nevertheless, and to which their imagination
made such stupendous additions. I honour their courage
in bidding the sun stand still, not that they might

126 LATER SOLILOQUIES

thoroughly vanquish an earthly enemy, but that they
might wholly clarify their own soul. For this better
purpose the sun need not stand still materially. For the
spirit, time is an elastic thing. Fancy is quick and brings
the widest vistas to a focus in a single instant. After the
longest interval of oblivion and death, it can light up the
same image in all the greenness of youth ; and if cut short,
as it were at Pompeii, in the midst of a word, it can,
ages after, without feeling the break, add the last syllable.
Imagination changes the scale of everything, and makes a
thousand patterns of the woof of nature, without disturbing
a single thread. Or rather — since it is nature itself that
imagines — it turns to music what was only strain ; as if
the universal vibration, suddenly ashamed of having been
so long silent and useless, had burst into tears and laughter
at its own folly, and in so doing had become wise.

30
THE WORLD'S A STAGE

NATURE, like a theatre, offers a double object to the mind.
There is in the first place the play presented, the overt
spectacle, which is something specious and ideal ; and
then there is something material and profound lying
behind and only symbolically revealed, namely, the stage,
the actors, and the author. The playful spectacular sort
of reality we can pretty well dominate and exhaust, if we
are attentive ; indeed the prospect, in its sensuous and
poetic essence, is plastic to attention, and alters its
character according to the spectator's station and faculty ;
a poetic theme develops as interest in it is aroused, and
offers different beauties and different morals to every
new critic. The instrumentalities, on the contrary, which
bring this spectacle before us, whether they be material
or personal, are unfathomable. They are events, not
ideas. Even putting together all that carpenters and
chemists, biographers and psychologists, might learn about
these events, we could never probe them to the bottom.
In the beginning, as for a child at his first pantomime,

THE WORLD'S A STAGE 127

the play's the thing ; and a human audience can never
quite outgrow this initial illusion, since this world is a
theatre nobody can visit twice. If we could become
habitues, old theatre-goers amongst the worlds, we might
grow more discriminating ; on the whole we might enjoy
the performances just as much or even more, perhaps ;
yet less breathlessly. We should see more and believe
less. | The pleasure of seeing is one, and the pleasure of
believing is quite another ; the first liberates our senses
and fills the present with light ; the second directs our
conduct and relieves our anxiety or doubts about the past
and future. When the spectator bethinks himself of
destiny as well as of beauty, his sensibility becomes tragic,
it becomes intelligence. Every picture is then regarded
as a sign for the whole situation which has generated
it or which it forebodes. The given image, for intelligence,
expresses a problematic fact ; and intelligence invents
various grammatical forms and logical categories by which
to describe its hidden enemy or fascinating prey. So
spontaneous and dogmatic is the intellect in this interpreta
tion of the scene that the conceived object (however
abstractly sketched) is unhesitatingly judged to be, as we
say, the real thing : it alone works and acts, whilst the
given image is either disregarded altogether or despised as
a mere word or phantasm of sense, such as only fools
would stop to gaze at. And it is very true, whatever
desperate efforts empiricism may make to deny it, that
every figure crossing the stage of apprehension is a symbol,
or may become a symbol ; they all have some occasion
and arise out of some deeper commotion in the material
world. The womb of nature is full of crowding events,
to us invisible ; the ballet has machinery behind its vistas
and its music ; the dancers possess a character and fate
in the daylight quite foreign to these fays and shepherds
before the footlights : what to us is a pirouette to them
is a twitch or a shilling. Shame to the impious egotism
that would deny it, and, in order to spare itself the tension
of faith and the labour of understanding, would pretend
to find in experience nothing but a shadowy tapestry, a
landscape without a substance. To its invisible substance
the spectacle owes riot only its existence but its meaning,

128 LATER SOLILOQUIES

since our interest in the scene is rooted in a hidden life
within us, quite as much as the shifts and colours of the
scenery are rooted in tricks of the stage. Nevertheless
the roots of things are properly and decently hidden under
ground, and it is as childish to be always pulling them
up, to make sure that they exist, as it is to deny their
existence. The flowers are what chiefly interests a man
of taste ; the spectacle is what liberal-minded people have
come to see. Every image has its specific aspect and
aesthetic essence, more or less charming in itself ; the
sensualist, the poet, the chronicler of his passing visions
must take them at their face value, and be content with
that. Fair masks, like flowers, like sunsets, like melodies
wrung out of troubled brains and strung wire, cover for
us appropriately the anatomical face of nature ; and
words and dogmas are other masks, behind which we, too,
can venture upon the stage ; for it is life to give expression
to life, transmuting diffused movements into clear images.
How blind is the zeal of the iconoclasts, and how profoundly
hostile to religious impulse ! They pour scorn upon eyes
that see not and a mouth that cannot speak ; they despise
a work of art or of thought for being finished and motion
less ; as if the images of the retina were less idols than
those of the sculptor, and as if words, of all things, were
not conventional signs, grotesque counterfeits, dead
messengers, like fallen leaves, from the dumb soul. Why
should one art be contemptuous of the figurative language
of another ? Jehovah, who would suffer no statues, was
himself a metaphor.

MASKS

WHEN we are children we love putting on masks to
astonish our elders ; there is a lordly pleasure in puzzling
those harmless giants who are not in the secret. We
ourselves, of course, know that it is only a disguise ; and
when presently we pull it off, their surprise at recognizing
us is something deliriously comic. Yet, at bottom, this
compulsory return to nature is a little sad ; our young

MASKS 129

empiricism would like to take appearances more seriously.
To an unsophisticated mind every transformation seems
as credible as it is interesting; there is always danger
and hope of anything. Why should people hesitate to
believe something intrinsically so plausible as that Johnny
should have acquired a bull's head, or that little Alice
should suddenly develop a red nose and furious mustachios ?
That is just the sort of thing that would happen if this
stupid world were only more natural ; but the trouble
with old people is that their minds have become stagnant,
dominated as they are by precedent and prejudice ; it
is too much of an exertion for them to imagine anything
but what they have always seen. Even when they tell
us about religion, which is so full of exciting and lovely
things that we know must be true, they seem to be trying
to remember something they have read or heard of, "and
quite spoil the story ; they don't seem to understand
at all, as we do, why it all happens. They are terrible
believers in substance, and can hardly lend themselves
to the wayward game of experience. This after all wouldn't
matter so much ; it is not worth while playing with people
who don't relish games. The subtlest part of the pleasure
is being blindfolded on purpose and feeling lost when you
know you are not lost. Empiricism would be agony if
any one was so silly as really to forget his material status
and to become the sport of his passing ideas. But masks
are great fun in themselves, and when you are fundamentally
sane it is pleasant to play the madman and to yield to the
eloquence of an imagined life ; and it is intolerable to have
the game spoiled by some heavy-footed person who con
stantly reminds you of the discovered facts and will not
lend himself to the spirit of your fiction, which is the deepest
part of your own spirit. No one would be angry with a
man for unintentionally making a mistake about a matter
of fact ; but if he perversely insists on spoiling your story
in the telling of it, you want to kick him ; and this is the
reason why every philosopher and theologian is justly
vexed with every other. When we are children the
accident and fatality of having been born human are
recent and only half welcome ; we still feel a little hurt at
being so arbitrarily confined to one miserable career and

130 LATER SOLILOQUIES

forced to remain always consistent ; we still see the equal
antecedent propriety of being anybody or anything else.
Masks afford us the pleasing excitement of revising our
so accidental birth-certificate and of changing places in
spirit with some other changeling.

Nevertheless the game soon tires. Although children
are no believers in substance, they are substances them
selves without knowing it. The mask refuses to grow on
to their flesh : it thwarts their rising impulses. Play
acting is seldom worth the commitments it involves ;
your part, after a few enthusiastic rehearsals, turns out
not really to suit you. It seemed at first to open up
splendid adventures and give you a chance to display
your unsuspected passions and powers ; but now you
begin to think your speeches ridiculous and your costume
unbecoming. You must pull off the mask to see clearly
and to breathe freely ; you are overheard indulging in
asides that are out of character, and swearing in the
unvarnished vernacular ; and when the performance at
last is over, what a relief to fling away your wig and your
false beard, and relapse into your honest self ! There
is no place like home, although there may be better places ;
and there is no face like one's own, for comfort to the
wearer.

The Englishman likes to be comfortable, and he hates
masks. It is pleasant to be straightforward, as it is to
be clean. Mere facades offend him so much that he actually
manages to build houses without them ; they have creepers,
they have chimneys, they have bow-windows, they have
several doors, but they have no front. His Empire, too,
for all its extent and complexity, presents no imposing
fa$ade to the world ; it seems to elude observation and to
be everywhere apologizing for its existence. Its enemies,
on the contrary, both at home and abroad, are blatancy
itself, always parading their heroisms and their ambitions ;
and one wonders how a power so hated, so hesitant, and so
involuntary can last at all. But it has a certain plastic
invulnerability ; you pommel it and trample on it here,
and its strength turns out to have lain in quite another
quarter. It is like the sort of man who serves it, a
pale languid youth, sprawling on cushions, and lisping a

MASKS 131

little when he cares to take his pipe out of his mouth at
all ; but what is your surprise when, something having
happened, he gets up and knocks you down. Nothing
had ptrepared you for that ; no philosophical eloquence
or resounding coup d'etat : he is perhaps a little surprised
himself at his energy. He blushes if by chance any warm
gesture or expression has escaped him ; he feels that it
misrepresents his average sentiment ; the echo of it sounds
hollow in his ear, and just because it was so spontaneous
he detests it as if it had been a lie. The passing grimaces
of passion, the masks of life, are odious to him ; yet he
is quite happy to be deceived and to be masked by a thick
atmosphere of convention, if only this atmosphere is
temperate and sustained. He will be loyal to any nonsense
that seems to justify his instincts and that has got a
domestic stamp ; but elaborate original lies are not in
his nature ; he has no histrionic gift. Intrigue requires
a clear perception of the facts, an insight into other
people's motives, and a power of sustained simulation ;
he is not clever at any of these things. Masks, wigs,
cowls, and stays are too troublesome ; if you are not
always on the watch, the beastly things will fall off. He
prefers to dress his personage more constitutionally ; the
dyes he uses must be all indelible, such as religion and
education can supply. These, with the habit of his set or
profession, are his lifelong make-up and his second nature ;
his only mask is the imperturbed expression which time and
temperance have chiselled in his face.

32
THE TRAGIC MASK

MASKS are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of
feeling, at once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living
things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle,
and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts ;
yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for
not being things, and with words for not being feelings.
LWords and images are like shells, no less integral parts of

132

LATER SOLILOQUIES

nature than are the substances they cover, but better
addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I
would not say that substance exists for the sake of appear
ance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the
sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for
the sake of anything else ; all these phases and products are
nvolved equally in the round of existence, and it would
DC sheer wilfulness to praise the germinal phase on the
ground that it is vital, and to denounce the explicit phase
on the ground that it is dead and sterile.! We might as
justly despise the seed for being merely instrumental, and
glorify the full-blown flower, or the conventions of art,
as the highest achievement and fruition of life. Substance
is fluid, and, since it cannot exist without some form, is
always ready to exchange one form for another ; but
sometimes it falls into a settled rhythm or recognizable
vortex, which we call a nature, and which sustains an
interesting form for a season. These sustained forms are
enshrined in memory and worshipped in moral philosophy,
which often assigns to them a power to create and to
reassert themselves which their precarious status is very
far from justifying. But they are all in all to the mind :
art and happiness lie in pouring and repouring the molten
metal of existence through some such tenable mould.

Masks are accordingly glorious things ; we are in
stinctively as proud of designing and wearing them as we
are of inventing and using words. The blackest tragedy
is festive ; the most pessimistic philosophy is an enthusiastic
triumph of thought. The life which such expressions seem
to arrest or to caricature would be incomplete without
them ; indeed, it would be blind and abortive. It is no
interruption to experience to master experience, as tragedy
aspires to do ; nor is it an interruption to sink into
its episodes and render them consummate, which is the
trick of comedy. On the contrary, without such playful
pauses and reflective interludes our round of motions and
sensations would be deprived of that intellectual dignity
which relieves it and renders it morally endurable — the
dignity of knowing what we are doing, even if it be foolish
in itself, and with what probable issue. Tragedy, the
knowledge of death, raises us to that height. In fancy

"' '

THE TRAGIC MASK 133

and for a moment it brings our mortal wills into harmony
with our destiny, with the wages of existence, and with
the silence beyond. These discoveries of reason have
fixed the expression of the tragic mask, half horror and half
sublimity. Such is the countenance of man when turned
towards death and eternity and looking beyond all his
endeavours at the Gorgon face of the truth. This is not
to say that it is less human, or less legitimate, to look
in other directions and to make other faces. But whether
the visage we assume be a joyful or a sad one, in adopting
and emphasizing it we define our sovereign temper. Hence
forth, so long as we continue under the spell of this self-
knowledge, we do not merely live but act ; we compose
and play our chosen character, we wear the buskin of
deliberation, we defend and idealize our passions, we
encourage ourselves eloquently to be what we are, devoted
or scornful or careless or austere ; we soliloquize (before
an imaginary audience) and we wrap ourselves gracefully
in the mantle of our inalienable part. So draped, we
solicit applause and expect to die amid a universal hush.
We profess to live up to the fine sentiments we have
uttered, as we try to believe in the religion we profess.
The greater our difficulties the greater our zeal. Under
our published principles and plighted language we must
assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and
conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate
character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our
involuntary dreams. The portrait we paint in this way
and exhibit as our true person may well be in the grand
manner, with column and curtain and distant landscape
and finger pointing to the terrestrial globe or to the Yorick-
skull of philosophy ; but if this style is native to us and
our art is vital, the more it transmutes its model the
deeper and truer art it will be.] The severe bust of an
archaic sculpture, scarcely humanizing the block, will
express a spirit far more justly than the man's dull morning
looks or casual grimaces. Every one who is sure of his
mind, or proud of his office, or anxious about his duty
assumes a tragic mask. He deputes it to be himself and
transfers to it almost all his vanity. While still alive
and subject, like all existing things, to the undermining

134 LATER SOLILOQUIES

flux of his own substance, he has crystallized his soul
into an idea, and more in pride than in sorrow he has
offered up his life on the altar of the Muses. Self-knowledge,
like any art or science, renders its subject-matter in a new
medium, the medium of ideas, in which it loses its old
dimensions and its old pace. Our animal habits are trans
muted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we
become " persons " or masks. Art, truth, and death turn
everything to marble.

That life should be able to reach such expression in the
realm of eternal form is a sublime and wonderful privilege,
but it is tragic, and for that reason distasteful to the animal
in man. A mask is not responsive ; you must not speak to
it as to a living person, you must not kiss it. If you do,
you will find the cold thing repulsive and ghastly. It is
only a husk, empty, eyeless, brittle, and glazed. fThe more
comic its expression the more horrible it will prove, being
that of a corpse. The animal in man responds to things
according to their substance, edible, helpful, or plastic ; his
only joy is to push his way victoriously through the material
world, till a death stops him which he never thought of and,
in a sense, never experiences. He is not in the least
interested in picturing what he is or what he will have
been ; he is intent only on what is happening to him now
'.or may happen to him next. But when the passions see
/ themselves in the mirror of reflection, what they behold is a
| tragic mask. This is the escutcheon of human nature, in
* which its experience is emblazoned. In so far as men are
men at all, or men of honour, they militate under this
standard and are true to their colours. Whatever refuses
to be idealized in this way, they are obliged to disown and
commit to instant oblivion. It will never do for a mind
merely to live through its passions or its perceptions ; it
must discern recognizable objects, in which to centre its
experience and its desires ; it must choose names and
signs for them, and these names and symbols, if they are
to perform their function in memory and intercourse, must
be tightly conventional. What could be more unseemly
than a fault in grammar, or in many a case more laughable
and disconcerting ? Yet any solecism, if it were once
stereotyped and made definitely significant, would become

THE TRAGIC MASK 135

an idiom : it would become a good verbal mask. What is
not covered in this way by some abiding symbol can never
be recovered ; the dark flood of existence carries it down
bodily. Only in some word or conventional image can thel
secret of one moment be flashed to another moment ; and}
even when there is no one ready to receive the message, ;
or able to decipher it, at least the poet in his soliloquy has •
uttered his mind and raised his monument in his own eyes ;
and in expressing his life he has found it.

33
THE COMIC MASK

THE clown is the primitive comedian. Sometimes in the
exuberance of animal life a spirit of riot and frolic comes
over a man ; he leaps, he dances, he tumbles head over
heels, he grins, shouts, or leers, possibly he pretends to go
to pieces suddenly, and blubbers like a child. A moment
later he may look up wreathed in smiles, and hugely
pleased about nothing. All this he does hysterically,
without any reason, by a sort of mad inspiration and
irresistible impulse. He may easily, however, turn his
absolute histrionic impulse, his pure fooling, into mimicry
of anything or anybody that at the moment happens to
impress his senses ; he will crow like a cock, simper like a
young lady, or reel like a drunkard. Such mimicry is
virtual mockery, because the actor is able to revert from
those assumed attitudes to his natural self ; whilst his
models, as he thinks, have no natural self save that imitable
attitude, and can never disown it ; so that the clown feels
himself immensely superior, in his role of universal satirist,
to all actual men, and belabours and rails at them unmerci
fully. He sees everything in caricature, because he sees the
surface only, with the lucid innocence of a child ; and all
these grotesque personages stimulate him, not to moral
sympathy, nor to any consideration of their fate, but rather
to boisterous sallies, as the rush of a crowd, or the hue and
cry of a hunt, or the contortions of a jumping- jack might
stimulate him. He is not at all amused intellectually ; he

136 LATER SOLILOQUIES

is not rendered wiser or tenderer by knowing the predica
ments into which people inevitably fall ; he is merely
excited, flushed, and challenged by an absurd spectacle.
Of course this rush and suasion of mere existence must
never fail on the stage, nor in any art ; it is to the drama
what the hypnotizing stone block is to the statue, or
shouts and rhythmic breathing to the bard ; but such
primary magical influences may be qualified by reflection,
and then rational and semi-tragic unities will supervene.
When this happens the histrionic impulse creates the idyl
or the tragic chorus ; henceforth the muse of reflection
follows in the train of Dionysus, and the revel or the rude
farce passes into humane comedy.

Paganism was full of scruples and superstitions in matters
of behaviour or of cultus, since the cultus too was regarded
as a business or a magic craft ; but in expression, in
reflection, paganism was frank and even shameless ; it felt
itself inspired, and revered this inspiration. It saw nothing
impious in inventing or recasting a myth about no matter
how sacred a subject. Its inspiration, however, soon fell
into classic moulds, because the primary impulses of nature,
though intermittent, are monotonous and clearly defined,
as are the gestures of love and of anger. A man who is
unaffectedly himself turns out to be uncommonly like other
people. Simple sincerity will continually rediscover the
old right ways of thinking and speaking, and will be perfectly
conventional without suspecting it. This classic iteration
comes of nature, it is not the consequence of any revision
or censorship imposed by reason. Reason, not being
responsible for any of the facts or passions that enter into
human life, has no interest in maintaining them as they
are ; any novelty, even the most revolutionary, would
merely afford reason a fresh occasion for demanding a
fresh harmony. But the Old Adam is conservative ; he
repeats himself mechanically in every child who cries and
loves sweets and is imitative and jealous. Reason, with
its tragic discoveries and restraints, is a far more precarious
and personal possession than the trite animal experience
and the ancestral grimaces on which it supervenes ; and
automatically even the philosopher continues to cut his
old comic capers, as if no such thing as reason existed. The

THE COMIC MASK 137

wiseacres too are comic, and their mask is one of the most
harmlessly amusing in the human museum ; for reason,
taken psychologically, is an old inherited passion like any
other, the passion for consistency and order ; and it is just
as prone as the other passions to overstep the modesty of
nature and to regard its own aims as alone important. But
this is ridiculous ; because importance springs from the
stress of nature, from the cry of life, not from reason and
its pale prescriptions. Reason cannot stand alone ; brute
habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals,
and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive,
the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness. What
tragedy could there be, or what sublime harmonies rising
out of tragedy, if there were no spontaneous passions to
create the issue, no wild voices to be reduced to harmony ?,
(Moralists have habitually aimed at suppression, wisely
perhaps at first, when they were preaching to men of
spirit ; but why continue to harp on propriety and
unselfishness and labour, when we are little but labour-
machines already, and have hardly any self or any passions •
left to indulge ?1 Perhaps the time has come to suspend
those exhortations, and to encourage us to be sometimes
a little lively, and see if we can invent something worth
saying or doing. We should then be living in the spirit of
comedy, and the world would grow young. Every occasion
would don its comic mask, and make its bold grimace at^
the world for a moment. We should be constantly original"
without effort and without shame, somewhat as we are in
dreams, and consistent only in sincerity ; and we should
gloriously emphasize all the poses we fell into, without
seeking to prolong them.

Objections to the comic mask — to the irresponsible,
'complete, extreme expression of each moment — cut at the
roots of all expression. Pursue this path, and at once you
do away with gesture : we must not point, we must not
pout, we must not cry, we must not laugh aloud ; we
must not only avoid attracting attention, but our
attention must not be obviously attracted ; it is silly
to gaze, says the nursery-governess, and rude to stare.
Presently words, too, will be reduced to a telegraphic
code. A man in his own country will talk like the laconic

138 LATER SOLILOQUIES

tourist abroad ; his whole vocabulary will be Ou ? Com-
bienP All right! Dear me! Conversation in the quiet
home will dispense even with these phrases ; nothing
will be required but a few pragmatic grunts and signals
for action. Where the spirit of comedy has departed,
company becomes constraint, reserve eats up the spirit,
and people fall into a penurious melancholy in their
scruple to be always exact, sane, and reasonable, never
to mourn, never to glow, never to betray a passion or a
weakness, nor venture to utter a thought they might not
wish to harbour for ever.

Yet irony pursues these enemies of comedy, and for
fear of wearing a mask for a moment they are hypocrites all
their lives. Their very reserve becomes a pose, a convention
imposed externally, and their mincing speech turns to cant.
Sometimes this evasion of impulsive sentiment fosters a
poignant sentimentality beneath. The comedy goes on
silently behind the scenes, until perhaps it gets the upper
1 hand and becomes positive madness ; or else it breaks out
in some shy, indirect fashion, as among Americans with

1 their perpetual joking. Where there is no habitual art and
no moral liberty, the instinct for direct expression is
atrophied for want of exercise ; and then slang and a
humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-
valves to sanity ; and you manage to express yourself
in spite of the censor by saying something grotesquely
different from what you mean. Jhat is a long way round
to sincerity, and an ugly one/ What, on the contrary,
could be more splendidly sincere tnan the impulse to play
in real life, to rise on the rising wave of every feeling and
let it burst, if it will, into the foam of exaggeration ? Life
is not a means, the mind is not a slave nor a photograph :
it has a right to enact a pose, to assume a panache, and to
create what prodigious allegories it will for the mere sport
and glory of it. Nor is this art of innocent make-believe
forbidden in the Decalogue, although Bible-reading Anglo-
Saxondom might seem to think so. On the contrary, the
Bible and the Decalogue are themselves instances of it. To
embroider upon experience is not to bear false witness
against one's neighbour, but to bear true witness to oneself.
Fancy is playful and may be misleading to those who try

THE COMIC MASK 139

to take it for literal fact ; but literalness is impossible in
any utterance of spirit, and if it were possible it would be
deadly. Why should we quarrel with human nature, with
metaphor, with myth, with impersonation ? The foolish
ness of the simple is delightful ; only the foolishness of the
wise is exasperating.

34
CARNIVAL

IN this world we must either institute conventional forms
of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to
express ; the choice lies between a mask and a fig-leaf.
Art and discipline render seemly what would be unseemly
without them, but hypocrisy hides it ostentatiously under
something irrelevant, and the fig-leaf is only a more
ignominious mask. For the moment it is certainly easier
to suppress the wild impulses of our nature than to
manifest them fitly, at the right times and with the proper
fugitive emphasis ; yet in the long run suppression does
not, solve the problem, and meantime those maimed
expressions which are allowed are infected with a secret
misery and falseness. It is the charm and safety of virtue
that it is more natural than vice, but many moralists do
their best to deprive it of this advantage.) They seem to
think it would lose its value if they lost their office. Their
precepts, as distinguished from the spontaneous apprecia
tions of men, are framed in the interests of utility, and are
curiously out of sympathy with the soul. Precept divides
the moral world materially into right and wrong things ;
but nothing concrete is right or wrong intrinsically, and
every object or event has both good and bad effects in the
context of nature. Every passion, like life as a whole,
has its feet in one moral climate and its head in another.
Existence itself is not a good, but only an opportunity.
Christians thank God for their creation, preservation, and
all the blessings of this life, but life is the condition and
source of all evil, and the Indians thank Brahma or Buddha
for lifting them out of it. What metaphysical psychologists
call Will is the great original sin, the unaccountable and

140 LATER SOLILOQUIES

irrational interest which the spirit takes, when it is incarnate,
in one thing happening rather than another ; yet this mad

' I interest is the condition of generosity and of every virtue.

I Love is a red devil at one end of its spectrum and an ultra-

I violet angel at the other end.

Nor is this amphibious moral quality limited to the
passions ; all facts and objects in nature can take on
opposite moral tints. When abstracted from our own
presence and interests, everything that can be found or
imagined is reduced to a mere essence, an ideal theme
picked out of the infinite, something harmless, marvellous,
and pure, like a musical rhythm or geometrical design.
The whole world then becomes a labyrinth of forms and
motions, a castle in the clouds built without labour and
dissolved without tears. The moment the animal will
reawakes, however, these same things acquire a new
dimension ; they become substantial, not to be created
without effort nor rent without resistance ; at the same
time they become objects of desire and fear ; we are so
engrossed in existence that every phenomenon becomes
questionable and ominous, and not so much a free gift
and manifestation of its own nature as a piece of good or
bad news. We are no longer surprised, as a free spirit
would be, at the extraordinary interest we take in things
turning out one way rather than another. We are caught
in the meshes of time and place and care ; and as the
things we have set our heart on, whatever they may be,
must pass away in the end, either suddenly or by a gentle

'/transformation, we cannot take a long view without finding
life sad, and all things tragic. This aspect of vanity and
self-annihilation, which existence wears when we consider
its destiny, is not to be denied or explained away, as is
sometimes attempted in cowardly and mincing philosophies.
It is a true aspect of existence in one relation and on a
certain view ; but to take this long view of existence, and
look down the avenues of time from the station and with
the emotions of some particular moment, is by no means
inevitable, noz-ialt a fair and sympathetic way of viewing
existence. Things when they are actual do not lie in that
sort of sentimental perspective, but each is centred in
itself ; and in this intrinsic aspect existence is nothing

Q

*t <>

CARNIVAL 141

tragic or sad, but rather something joyful, hearty, and
merry. A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses
and miscellaneous sympathies : it changes with the
changing world; and when not too much starved or
thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and
comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to
be free play altogether. In youth anything is pleasant to
see or to do, so long as it is spontaneous, and if the
conjunction of these things is ridiculous, so much the
better : to be ridiculous is part of the fun.

Existence involves changes and happenings and is comic
inherently, like a pun that begins with one meaning and
ends with another. Incongruity is a consequence of change ;
and this incongruity becomes especially conspicuous when,
as in the flux of nature, change is going on at different
rates in different strands of being, so that not only does
each thing surprise itself by what it becomes, but it is
continually astonished and disconcerted by what other
things have turned into without its leave. The mishaps,
the expedients, the merry solutions of comedy, in which
everybody acknowledges himself beaten and deceived, yet
is the happier for the unexpected posture of affairs, belong
to the very texture of temporal being ; and if people repine
at these mishaps, or rebel against these solutions, it is only
because their souls are less plastic and volatile than the
general flux of nature. The individual grows old and lags
behind ; he remembers his old pain and resents it when
the world is already on a new tack. In the jumble of
existence there must be many a knock and many a grief ;
people living at cross purposes cannot be free from malice,
and they must needs be fooled by their pretentious passions.
But there is no need of taking these evils tragically. At
bottom they are gratuitous, and might have been avoided
if people had not pledged their hearts to things beyond
their control and had not entrenched themselves in their
illusions. At a sufficient remove every drama seems
pathological and makes much ado about what to other
people is nothing. We are interested in those vicissitudes,
which we might have undergone if placed under the given
circumstances ; but we are happy to have escaped them.
Thus the universe changes its hues like the chameleon, not

142 LATER SOLILOQUIES

at random but in a fashion which moral optics can deter
mine, as it appears in one perspective or another ; for
everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic
in its fate, and comic in its existence.

Existence is indeed distinguishable from the platonic
essences that are embodied in it precisely by being a
conjunction of things mutually irrelevant, a chapter
of accidents, a medley improvised here and now for
no reason, to the exclusion of the myriad other farces
which, so far as their ideal structure is concerned, might
have been performed just as well. This world is contin-
i; gency and absurdity incarnate, the oddest of possibilities
\ masquerading momentarily as a fact. Custom blinds
1 persons who are not naturally speculative to the egregious
character of the actual, because custom assimilates their
expectations to the march of existing things and deadens
their power to imagine anything different. But wherever
the routine of a barbaric life is broken by the least ac
quaintance with larger ways, the arbitrariness of the
actual begins to be discovered. The traveller will first
learn that his native language is not the only one, nor
the best possible, nor itself constant ; then, perhaps, he
will understand that the same is true of his home religion
and government. The naturalist will begin by marvelling
at the forms and habits of the lower animals, while con
tinuing to attribute his own to their obvious propriety ;
later the heavens and the earth, and all physical laws, will
strike him as paradoxically arranged and unintelligible ;
and ultimately the very elements oi existence — time,
change, matter, habit, life cooped in bodies — will reveal
themselves to him in their extreme oddity, so that, unless
he has unusual humility and respect for fact, he will
probably declare all these actual things to be impossible
and therefore unreal. The most profound philosophers
accordingly deny that any of those things exist which we
find existing, and maintain that the only reality is change
less, infinite, and indistinguishable into parts ; and I call
them the most profound philosophers in spite of this obvious
folly of theirs, because they are led into it by the force of
intense reflection, which discloses to them that what
exists is unintelligible and has no reason for existing ; and

CARNIVAL 143

since their moral and religious prejudices do not allow
them to say that to be irrational and unintelligible is the
character proper to existence, they are driven to the
alternative of saying that existence is illusion and that
the only reality is something beneath or above existence.
That real existence should be radically comic never occurs
to these solemn sages ; they are without one ray of humour
and are persuaded that the universe too must be without
one. Yet there is a capital joke in their own systems,
which prove that nothing exists so strenuously, that
existence laughs aloud in their vociferations and drowns
the argument. Their conviction is the very ghost which it
rises to exorcise ; yet the conviction and the exorcism
remain impressive, because they bear witness to the
essential strangeness of existence to the spirit. Like
the Ghost in Hamlet this apparition, this unthinkable
fact, is terribly disturbing and emphatic ; it cries to us
in a hollow voice, " Swear ! " and when in an agony of
concern and affection we endeavour to follow it, " Tis
here ! 'Tis here ! 'Tis gone ! " Certainly existence can;
bewitch us ; it can compel us to cry as well as to laugh ;\
it can hurt, and that is its chief claim to respect. Its
cruelty, however, is as casual as its enchantments ; it is
not cruel on purpose but only rough, like thoughtless boys.
Coarseness — and existence is hopelessly coarse — is not an
evil unless we demand refinement. A giggling lass that;
peeps at us through her fingers is well enough in her sphere,
but we should not have begun by calling her Dulcinea.
Dulcinea is a pure essence, and dwells only in that realm.
Existence should be met on its own terms ; we may dance
a round with it, and perhaps steal a kiss ; but it tempts
only to flout us, not being dedicated to any constant love.
As if to acknowledge how groundless existence is, every
thing that arises instantly backs away, bowing its excuses,
and saying, " My mistake ! " It suffers from a sort of
original sin or congenital tendency to cease from being.
This is what Heraclitus called A 1/07, or just punishment ;
because, as Mephistopheles long afterwards added, alles
was entsteht ist wert dass es zugrunde geht — whatsoever
arises deserves to perish ; not of course because what
arises is not often a charming creation, but because it has

i44 LATER SOLILOQUIES

no prerogative to exist not shared by every Cinderella-like
essence that lies eternally neglected in that limbo to which
all things intrinsically belong — the limbo of unheard
melodies and uncreated worlds. For anything to emerge
from that twilight region is inexplicable and comic, like
the popping up of Jack-in-the-box ; and the shock will
amuse us, if our wits are as nimble as nature and as quick
as time. We too exist ; and existence is a joy to the
sportive side of our nature, itself akin to a shower of
sparks and a patter of irrevocable adventures. What
indeed could be more exhilarating than such a rout, if
only we are not too exacting, and do not demand of it
irrelevant perfections ? The art of life is to keep step with
the celestial orchestra that beats the measure of our career,
and gives the cue for our exits and our entrances. Why
should we willingly miss anything, or precipitate anything,
or be angry with folly, or in despair at any misadventure ?
In this world there should be none but gentle tears, and
fluttering tip-toe loves. It is a great Carnival, and amongst
these lights and shadows of comedy, these roses and vices
of the playhouse, there is no abiding.

35
QUEEN MAB

NATURE, which is far more resourceful than logic, has
found a way out of the contradiction between the human
need for expression and the British distaste for personal
outbursts. This way is rambling fiction. When out of
shyness, or because they have shocked each other, the inner
man and the outer man are not on speaking terms, loud
language and vehement gestures are incompatible with
depth of feeling. What lies deep must in such a case
remain unexpressed, and will seem inexpressible. A man's
heart will be revealed, even to himself, only in long
stretches of constant endeavour and faithful habit :
towards the end of his life he may begin to discern his
ruling motives. In the meantime, however, his fancy
may have played at self-revelation ; he may have indulged

QUEEN MAB 145

in day-dreams and romantic transformations of himself,
as boys do ; and without pledging his real person too much
he may have made trial of candour, or, if need be, of
extravagance, in imaginary substitutes for himself, thus
trying the paces of his inner man without cheapening his
secret feelings or publishing them in common and second
hand terms. Such a man will talk little about himself ;
his opinions and preferences will not be very explicit,
but he will privily nurse and develop them by endless
variations played upon them in fancy, as he reads or perhaps
writes a book of fiction by his chimney corner. He will
dream of what Queen Mab makes other people dream.

Romantic fiction is a bypath of expression ; it meanders
through fields of possible experience that stretch harmlessly
between the highroads of actual lives, far from the precipices
of private and public passions. The labyrinth is infinite,
but the path chosen in it is always traceable by a sort of
Ariadne's thread spun out of the poet's heart. He means
to forget himself and to feign some charming monster in
some picturesque landscape, the more exotic the better ;
but in doing so he obeys the dream-impulses of his own
soul, and recasts or corrects the images supplied by his
experience. His very extravagances and hectic concentra
tion of fancy betray him ; they manifest his impatience,
his affections, his potentialities ; for he paints what he
can conceive and what fascinates him in conceiving it.
That which he might have been, and was not, comforts
him. Such a form of self-expression, indirect, bashful,
and profoundly humorous, being play rather than art,
is alone congenial to the British temperament ; it is the
soul of English literature. Like English politics and
religion, it breathes tolerance, plasticity, waywardness,
infinitude ; it is tender and tentative, shapeless and guile
less. Its straggling march forms a vast national soliloquy,
rich in casual touches, in alternatives, in contrasts, in
suspended themes ; the plot grows out of the episodes, it
is always being remodelled and always to be continued.
The facts, though much talked of in detail, are never faced
as a whole, nor is the soul ever gathered together to
pronounce upon them ; the whole procedure is a subter
fuge, and may be easily disparaged by people with other

146 LATER SOLILOQUIES

gifts and aspirations. Intelligence certainly does not
dominate it ; its conclusions, when it reaches conclusions,
are false, and its methods cumbrous ; and foreigners who
adopt them are catching only the vices of their model.
But its virtues are transcendent ; if the mind of England
is wrapped in mists, it is touched with ethereal colours ;
and who shall measure the benign influences, the lights,
the manliness, the comforts, the moral sanity that have
spread from it through the world ? Its very incapacities
are full of promise ; it closes no doors ; it is the one
fountain of kindly liberty on earth. The Englishman's
prejudices are so obviously prejudices as to be almost
innocent, and even amiable ; his consecrated formulas
(for of course he has them) are frankly inadequate and
half humorous ; he would not have you suppose he has
said his all, nor his last word. He is jealous of preserving,
far from public observation or censure, the free play of
his potential sentiments ; from thence he will occasionally
fetch some scrap of a word, or let slip some hint of emotion ;
he will only murmur or suggest or smile his loves. Every
body dislikes a caricature of himself ; and the Englishman
feels (I think justly) that any figure a man can cut in other
people's eyes is a caricature. Therefore, if there is any
thing in him, he fears to betray it ; and if there is nothing
in him, he fears to betray that ; and in either case he is
condemned to diffidence and shyness. He wishes you to
let him alone ; perhaps if you do he may presently tell
you, about quite another imaginary person, some vivid
and tender story.

This story may be a fairy tale or it may be a piece
of realistic fiction, in which the experiences of sundry
characters, as different as possible from oneself and from
one another, are imagined and lived through. The author
may fairly say that these creations are not masks for his
own person ; it is expressly not his own feelings that he
is evoking and developing. He is fancying other feelings ;
and yet, as this fancy and the magic life it constitutes are
necessarily his own, his mind is being secretly agitated
and relieved by these fictions ; and his sensibility, instead
of being sublimated into some ultimate tragic passion, is
diffused over a thousand picturesque figures and adventures

QUEEN MAB 147

with which he acknowledges no moral kinship, save such
as is requisite for a lively interest in them and a minute
portrayal. It is only by accident that any of his poetic
offspring may resemble their parent. What cares he what
curious eye may note their deformity ? He need not blush
for them. He may even be bent on unmasking and fiercely
condemning them, as a scrupulous penitent is bent on
ferreting out and denouncing his real or fancied sins. In
the most searching truth of fiction there is accordingly
no indiscretion ; the author's inmost and least avowable
feelings may be uttered through it without reserve. Like
a modest showman behind the curtain of his booth, he
manipulates his marionettes and speaks for them in a
feigned voice, by a sort of ventriloquy. Here is no religious
tragedy, no distilled philosophy, no overarching cosmic
myth. The scale is pleasantly small and the tone familiar,
though the sum of the parts may fade into the infinite.
We do not find in this complicated dream any life greater
than our own or less accidental. We do not need to out
grow ourselves in order to understand it ; no one summons
us to pause, to recant, to renounce any part of our being.
On the contrary, we simply unwind our own reel ; we play
endlessly at living, and in this second visionary life we
survive all catastrophes, and we exchange one character
for another without carrying over any load of memory
or habit or fate. We seem still to undergo the vicissitudes
of a moral world, but without responsibility.

Queen Mab is a naughty sprite, full of idle curiosity
and impartial laughter. When she flutters over the
roofs of cities, she is no angel with a mission, coming to
sow there some chosen passion or purpose of her own ;
nor does she gather from those snoring mortals any
collective sentiment or aspiration, such as a classic muse
might render articulate, or such as religion or war or
some consecrated school of art might embody. She steals
wilily like a stray moonbeam into every crack and dark
old corner of the earth. Her deft touch, as she pretends,
sets all men dreaming, each after his own heart ; but like
other magicians, she is a fraud. Those garden fancies
about her fairy equipage are all a joke to amuse the
children ; her wings are, in reality, far finer than gossamer,

148 LATER SOLILOQUIES

and the Equivocation she rides on is nimbler than any
grasshopper. All she professes to spy out or provoke is
her own merry invention. Her wand really works no
miracle and sets no sleeper dreaming ; on the contrary,
it is rather an electric spark from the lover's brain or the
parson's nose, as she tickles it, that quickens her own
fancy, and hatches there an interminable brood of exquisite
oddities, each little goblin perfectly ridiculous, each quite
serious and proud of its little self, each battling bravely
for its little happiness. Queen Mab is the genius proper
to the art of a nation whose sensibility is tender, but
whose personal life is drab and pale. To report, however
poetically, the events and feelings they have actually
experienced would be dull, as dull as life ; their imagination
craves entertainment with something richer, more wayward,
more exciting. Every one is weary of his own society ;
the lifelong company of so meagre and warped a creature
has become insufferable. We see that the passions of
Mercutio are potentially deep and vivid ; but they have
been crossed by fortune, and on fortune his kindly humour
mockingly takes its revenge, by feigning no end of parodies
and escapades for the ineffable bright mischiefs lurking
in his bosom. Queen Mab is the frail mothlike emanation
of such a generous but disappointed mind ; her magic
lies in the ironical visions which, like the dust of the poppy,
she can call forth there. A Cinderella at home, she becomes
a seer in her midnight travels. Hence Table Rounds and
Ivanhoes ; hence three-volume novels about Becky Sharps
and David Copperfields. These imagined characters are
often alive, not only because the scene in which they move
may be well indicated, with romantic absorption in the
picturesque aspects of human existence, but also because
their minds are the author's mind dreaming ; they skirt
the truth of his inner man ; in their fancifulness or their
realism they retain a secret reference to the deepest impulses
in himself.

English lovers, I believe, seldom practise what in Spain
is called conjugating the verb ; they do not spend hours
ringing the changes on I love, you love, we love. This,
in their opinion, would be to protest too much. They
prefer the method of Paolo and Francesca : they will

QUEEN MAB 149

sit reading out of the same book, and when they come to
the kissing, she will say, " How nice that is !" and he will
reply, " Isn't it ? " and the story will supply the vicarious
eloquence of their love. Fiction and poetry, in some
supposititious instance, report for the Englishman the
bashful truth about himself ; and what English life thereby
misses in vivacity, English literature gains in wealth, in
tenderness, in a rambling veracity, and in preciousness to
the people's heart.

36
A CONTRAST WITH SPANISH DRAMA

IN classical Spanish drama the masks are few. The
characters hardly have individual names. The lady in
Calderon, for instance, if she is not Beatriz will be Leonor,
and under either name so superlatively beautiful, young,
chaste, eloquent, devoted, and resourceful, as to be in
distinguishable from her namesakes in the other plays.
The hero is always exaggeratedly in love, exaggeratedly
chivalrous, and absolutely perfect, save for this heroic
excess of sensitiveness and honour. The old father is
always austere, unyielding, perverse, and sublime. All
the maids in attendance possess the same roguishness, the
same genius for intrigue and lightning mendacity ; whilst
the valet, whether called Crispin or Florin, is always a
faithful soul and a coward, with the same quality of rather
forced humour. No diversity from play to play save the
diversity in the fable, in the angle at which the stock
characters are exhibited and the occasion on which they
versify ; for they all versify in the same style, with the
same inexhaustible facility, abundance, rhetorical finish,
and lyric fire.

Why this monotony ? Did Spanish life afford fewer
contrasts, less individuality of character and idiom, than
did the England of Shakespeare ? Hardly : in Spain
the soldier of fortune, the grandee, peasant, monk, or pre
late, the rogue, beggar, and bandit were surely as highly
characterized as anything to be then found in England ;
and Spanish women in their natural ardour of affection,

150 LATER SOLILOQUIES

in their ready speech and discretion, in their dignity and
religious consecration, lent themselves rather better, one
would think, to the making of heroines than did those
comparatively cool and boylike young ladies whom Shake
speare transmuted into tragic angels. I think we may go
further and say positively that it was Spain rather than
England that could have shown the spectacle of " every
man in his humour."

Even in the days before Puritanism English character!
was English ; it tended to silent independence and outward
reserve, preferring to ignore its opposite rather than to:
challenge it. In pose and expression the Spaniard is|
naturally more theatrical and pungent ; and his individu
ality itself is stiffer. No doubt, in society, he will simulate
and dissimulate as an Englishman never would ; but he
is prompted to this un-English habit by the very fixity
of his purposes ; all his courtesy and loyalty are ironical,
and inwardly he never yields an inch. He likes if possible
to be statuesque ; he likes to appeal to his own principles
and character, and to say, " Sir, whatever you may think
of it, that is the sort of man I am." He has that curious
form of self-love which inclines to parade even its defects,
as a mourner parades his grief. He admits readily that
he is a sinner, and that he means to remain one ; he
composes his countenance proudly on that basis ; whereas
when English people say they are miserable sinners (which
happens only in church) they feel perhaps that they are
imperfect or unlucky, and they may even contemplate
being somewhat different in future ; but it never occurs
to them to classify themselves as miserable sinners for good,
with a certain pride in their class, deliberately putting on
the mask of Satan or the cock's feather of Mephistopheles
and saying to all concerned, " See what a very devil I am ! "
The Englishman's sins are slips ; he feels he was not himself
on those occasions, and does not think it fair to be reminded
of them. Though theology may sometimes have taught
him that he is a sinner fundamentally, such is not his
native conviction ; the transcendental ego in him cannot
admit any external standard to which it ought to have
conformed. The Spaniard is metaphysically humbler,
knowing himself to be a creature of accident and fate ;

•
A CONTRAST WITH SPANISH DRAMA 151

yet he is dramatically more impudent, and respects himself
more than he respects other people. He laughs at kings ;
and as amongst beggars it is etiquette to whine, and
ostentatiously to call oneself blind, old, poor, crippled,
hungry, and a brother of yours, so amongst avowed sinners
it may become a point of pride to hold, as it were, the record
as a liar, a thief, an assassin, or a harlot. These roles are
disgraceful when one is reduced to them by force of circum
stances or for some mean ulterior motive, but they recover
their human dignity when one wears them as a chosen
mask in the comedy of life. The pose, at that angle,
redeems the folly, and the fagade the building. Nor
is this a lapse into sheer immorality ; there is many a
primitive or animal level of morality beneath the conven
tional code ; and often crime and barbarism are as proud
of themselves as virtue, and no less punctilious. If there
is effrontery in such a rebellion, there may be also sincerity,
courage, relief, profound truth to one's own nature. Hence
the eloquence of romanticism. Passion and wilfulnessi
(which romanticists think are above criticism) cannot be
expected to understand that, if they merged and subsided
into a harmony, the life distilled out of their several deaths
would be infinitely more living and varied than any of
them, and would be beautiful and perfect to boot ; whereas
the romantic chaos which they prolong by their obstinacy
is the most hideous of hells. But avowed sinners and
proud romanticists insist on preserving and on loving hell,
because they insist on loving and preserving themselves.

It was not, then, moral variety that was lacking in
Spain, always a romantic country, but only interest in
moral variety. This lack of interest was itself an expres
sion of romantic independence, intensity, and pride. The
gentleman with his hand always on the hilt of his sword,
lest some whiff from anywhere should wound his vanity,
or the monk perpetually murmuring memento mori, closed
his mind to every alien vista. Of course he knew that the
world was full of motley characters : that was one of his
reasons for holding it at arm's length. What were those
miscellaneous follies to him but an offence or a danger ?
Why should he entertain his leisure in depicting or idealizing
them ? If some psychological zoologist cared to discant

152 LATER SOLILOQUIES

on the infinity of phenomena, natural or moral, well and
good ; but how should such things charm a man of honour,
a Christian, or a poet ? They might indeed be referred to
on occasion, as fabulists make the animals speak, with a
humorous and satirical intention, as a sort of warning and
confirmation to us in our chosen path ; but an appealing
poet, for such tightly integrated minds, must illustrate
and enforce their personal feelings. Moreover, although
in words and under the spell of eloquence the Spaniard
may often seem credulous and enthusiastic, he is dis
illusioned and cynical at heart ; he does not credit the
existence of motives or feelings better than those he has
observed, or thinks he has observed. His preachers
recommend religion chiefly by composing invectives against
the world, and his political writers express sympathy with
one foreign country only out of hatred for another, or
perhaps for their own. The sphere of distrust and in
difference begins for him very near home ; he has little
speculative sympathy with life at large ; he is cruel to
animals ; he shrugs his shoulders at crime in high places ;
he feels little responsibility to the public, and has small
faith in time and in work. This does not mean in the
least that his character is weak or his morality lax within
its natural range ; his affections are firm, his sense of
obligation deep, his delicacy of feeling often excessive ;
he is devoted to his family, and will put himself to any
inconvenience to do a favour to a friend at the public
expense. There are definite things to which his sentiments
and habits have pledged him : beyond that horizon
nothing speaks to his heart.

Such a people will not go to the play to be vaguely
entertained, as if they were previously bored. They
are not habitually bored ; they are full to the brim of their
characteristic passions and ideas. They require that the
theatre should set forth these passions and ideas as
brilliantly and convincingly as possible, in order to be
confirmed in them, and to understand and develop them
more clearly. Variety of plot and landscape they will
relish, because nothing is easier for them than to imagine
themselves born in the purple, or captive, or in love, or in
a difficult dilemma of honour ; and they will be deeply

A CONTRAST WITH SPANISH DRAMA 153

moved to see some constant spirit, like their own, buffeted
by fortune, but even in the last extremity never shaken.
The whole force of their dramatic art will lie in leading
them to dream of themselves in a different, perhaps more
glorious, position, in which their latent passions might
be more splendidly expressed. These passions are intense
and exceptionally definite ; and this is the reason, I think,
for the monotony of Spanish music, philosophy, and
romantic drama. All eloquence, all issues, all sentiments,
if they are not to seem vapid and trivial, must be such as
each man can make his own, with a sense of enhanced
vitality and moral glory. The lady, if he is to warm to
her praises, must not be less divine than the one he loves,
or might have loved ; the hero must not fall short of what,
under such circumstances, he himself would have wished
to be. The language, too, must always be worthy of the
theme : it cannot be too rapturous and eloquent. Unless
his soul can be fired by the poet's words, and can sing
them, as it were, in chorus, he will not care to listen to
them. But he will not tire of the same cadences or the
same images — stars, foam, feathers, flowers — if these
symbols, better than any others, transport him into
(the ethereal atmosphere which it is his pleasure to
breathe.!

The Spanish nation boils the same peas for its dinner
*the whole year round ; it has only one religion, if it has
any ; the pious part of it recites the same prayers fifty
or one hundred and fifty times daily, almost in one breath ;
the gay and sentimental part never ceases to sing the same
jotas and malaguenas. Such constancy is admirable. If
a dish is cheap, nutritious, and savoury on Monday, it
must be so on Tuesday, too ; it was a ridiculous falsehood,
though countenanced by some philosophers, which pre
tended that always to feel (or to eat) the same thing was
equivalent to never feeling (or eating) anything. Nor
does experience of a genuine good really have any tendency
to turn it into an evil, or into an indifferent thing ; at
most, custom may lead people to take it for granted, and
the thoughtless may forget its value, until, perhaps, they
lose it. Of course, men and nations may slowly change
their nature, and consequently their rational preferences ;

154 LATER SOLILOQUIES

but at any assigned time a man must have some moral
complexion, or if he has none, not much need be said
about him.

But there is another point to be considered. Need
human nature's daily food be exclusively the Spanish pea ?
Might it not just as well be rice, or polenta, or even beef
and bacon ? Much as I admire my countrymen's stomachs
for making a clear choice and for sticking to it, I rather
pity them for the choice they have made. That hard
yellow pea is decidedly heavy, flatulent, and indigestible.
I am sure Pythagoras would not have approved of it;
possibly it is the very bean he abhorred. Against the jota
and the malaguena I can say nothing ; I find in them I
know not what infinite, never-failing thrill and inimitable
power, the power which perfection of any kind always has ;
yet what are they in comparison to all the possibilities
of human music ? Enjoyment, which some people
call criticism, is something aesthetic, spontaneous, and
irresponsible ; the aesthetic perfection of anything is
incommensurable with that of anything else. But there
is a responsible sort of criticism which is political and
moral, and which turns on the human advantage of
possessing or loving this or that sort of perfection. To
cultivate some sorts may be useless or even hostile to the
possible perfection of human life. Spanish religion, again,
is certainly most human and most superhuman ; but its
mystic virtue to the devotee cannot alter the fact that,
on a broad view, it appears to be a romantic tour de force,
a desperate illusion, fostered by premature despair and by
a total misunderstanding of nature and history. Finally,
those lyrical ladies and entranced gentlemen of the Spanish
drama are like filigree flowers upon golden stems ; they
belong to a fantastic ballet, to an exquisite dream, rather
than to sane human society. The trouble is not that their
types are few and constant, but that these types are
eccentric, attenuated, and forced. They would not be
monotonous if they were adequate to human nature. How
vast, how kindly, how enveloping does the world of Shake
speare seem in comparison ! We seem to be afloat again on
the tide of time, in a young, green world ; we are ready
to tempt new fortunes, in the hope of reaching better things

A CONTRAST WITH SPANISH DRAMA 155

than we know. And this is the right spirit ; because
although the best, if it had been attained, would be all-
sufficient, the best is not yet.

<^fatw" .*4**r|^ *i

37
THE CENSOR AND THE POET

THERE is an important official of the inner man who in the
latest psychology is called the Censor ; his function is to
forbid the utterance, in the council chamber within us, of
unparliamentary sentiments, and to suppress all reports
not in the interest of our moral dignity. By relegating
half our experience to oblivion and locking up our unseemly
passions in solitary dungeons, the Censor composes a
conventional personage that we may decently present to
the world. It is he, whilst we are sane and virtuous, that
regulates our actions. It had occurred to me sometimes
that the Censor was only another name for our old friend
Reason ; but there is a great difference. This is no censor
of the noble Roman sort, like Cato Major ; he makes no
attempt to purify the republic from within ; he is not
concerned with moral health, honest harmony, and the
thorough extirpation of hopeless rebels. He is concerned
only with appearances and diplomatic relations ; his old
name was not Reason but Vanity or Self-love. He is
merely the head of the government propaganda, charged
with preventing inconvenient intelligence of our psycho
logical home politics from reaching foreign powers or
weakening the moral of our fighting force. He is the
father of shams. He invents those masterly methods of
putting our best foot forward, and sustaining the illusion
that we are always actuated by becoming and avowable
motives. He it is that dictates the polite movements by
which we show that we prefer the comfort of others to our
own. He causes us to put on mourning for those who have
left us legacies. He persuades us that we believe in the
religion of our ancestors, in the science of the day, in the
national cause, and in the party cry. He leads us to admire
the latest art, or the most ancient ; he enables us to be

156 LATER SOLILOQUIES

pleased with every fashion in turn, or perhaps to sigh at
its ugliness, if we are conscious of being the best-dressed
persons in the room. He induces us to follow the doings
of the royal family with affectionate awe, to love our
relations, to prefer Bach to Offenbach, and always to have
had a good time when we leave a friend's house. The
Censor sends our children to the best schools, to prove
what sacrifices we are willing to make for their good, and
to relieve us of further responsibility in regard to them.
He directs that considerations of wealth shall control our
careers, our friendships, and our manners ; and this is
perhaps the greatest sham of all the shams he has set up :
that money is an expression of happiness and a means to
it. What opens the way to happiness, if our character does
not render happiness impossible, is freedom, and some
security against want is usually necessary for that ; but
wealth, and the necessity of being fashionable if one is
rich, take away freedom. A genuine love for the pleasant
surroundings and the facilities which riches afford is often
keener in the outsider, who peeps in at the gate, than in
the master or his children who perhaps, if the Censor would
let them, would prefer their low acquaintance and their
days afield. But the Censor-ridden inner man cannot break
his harness. He is groomed and reined in like a pony at
the circus : at the crack of the whip the neck must be
bent, the tail switched, the trained feet must retrace the
circle in the sawdust, or tap the velvet barrier. So we
prance to our funeral, the last sham of all, after the Censor
has made our wills for us ; whereupon somebody else's
Censor gives us the finishing touches by praising our
character, and nailing down the coffin.

The untutored passions which the Censor keeps down
are themselves remarkable dissemblers. That old pro
pensity to allegory, which is now condemned in literature,
seems to rule unchecked in dreams. Invention in dreams,
as in mythology, is far-fetched, yet spontaneous. What
it sets immediately before us is a third or a fourth trans
formation of the fundamental fact. It hides the fact,
without misrepresenting it ; the orchestration of the theme,
the alien images in which allegory dresses it up, are
suggested by some subtle affinity, some instinctive choice,

THE CENSOR AND THE POET 157

which is perfectly automatic and innocent ; the Psyche
could find no simpler way of bringing her agitations to
consciousness. Just as we cannot see a material object
more clearly than by seeing exactly how it looks (though
that may not be at all how it is), so we cannot express a
feeling more sincerely than by rehearsing all the images,
all the metaphors, which it suggests to us. Passion when
aroused to speech is rich in rhetorical figures. When we
assert inaccurately that a man is a cur we depart from
observation only to register sentiment ; we express truly
the niche he fills in our thoughts. Dramatic poetry is an
excursus in this direction ; it reports the echoes which events
produce in a voluminous inner sensibility ; it throws back
our perception of what is going on into the latent dream
which this perception has for its background : for a percep
tion, apart from its object, is only one feature in a dream,
momentarily more salient than the rest. These natural
harlequins, the passions, are perfectly sincere in their
falsehoods and indirections : their fancy is their only
means of expressing the facts. To be more literal would
require training, and a painful effort ; it would require
the art of reading and discounting dreams, whilst these
simple poets have only the gift of dreaming. When Juliei^
dreams (it is a desperate poetic little dream created by
her passion) that she will cut up Romeo into bits and make \
stars of him, the image is extravagant ; yet if the funda
mental theme is, as I suppose, that every atom of Romeo
is precious, this mad but natural passion for the bits, even,
of what she loves, is expressed truly. But this sort of
sincere fiction, though it may put the Censor to sleep if
he does not quite understand what it signifies, is the very
opposite of his own shams ; it is exuberance and these
are suppression. If the Censor could have got at Juliet
in time, she would have expressed herself quite differently.
Wiping her prospective tears he would have said, " What
is Romeo's body to me ? Our spirits will be reunited in
heaven ! " This would have been a sham ; because we
should now not be led to understand that Juliet loved the
eyes and the hands and the lips of Romeo — which was the
fact to be expressed — but on the contrary her idolatrous
infatuation would have been hushed up, and something

i58 LATER SOLILOQUIES

else, an empty convention contradicting her true feeling,
would have been substituted for it.

The Censor may not be useless to the poet in the end,
because the need of shamming develops sensitiveness in
some directions, as in that, for instance, of self-conscious
ness. The vigour of art in England may depend on the
possibility of using the fineness of perception which
reticence enhances in order to invent new metaphors and
allegories by which to express the heart. Could a vigorous
English art, for instance, ever give expression to the
erotic passion which, according to this latest psychology,
plays such a great part in the Psyche ? The comic vein
of English writers commonly stops short at the improper.
This is doubtless a wise modesty on their part, because
every artist is a moralist, though he need not preach ; like
Orpheus he tames the simple soul to his persuasive
measures ; he insinuates his preferences and his principles,
he teaches us what to love : and to discover what we
truly love is the whole of ethics. Now if any passion were
sinful and really shameful in itself, it ought not to enter
at all into human life, either through the door of art or
through any other door. Conceivably a perfect expression
might still be given to it technically, although even this
is improbable if the artist had a bad conscience and a
leering eye ; but this expression, good only from an
abstracted point of view, would be on the whole an evil
experience and an evil possession. If the early Christians
and the Puritans and a whole cloud of mystics and ascetics
everywhere have been right in thinking the flesh essentially
sinful, the Censor must not be allowed to flinch ; on the
contrary, he must considerably extend his operations. If
you renounce the flesh you must renounce the world ;
things called indecent or obscene are inextricably woven
into the texture of human existence ; there can be no
completely honest comedy without them. Life itself would
have to be condemned as sinful ; we should deny that
anything harmonious, meiry, or sweet could be made of
it, either in the world or on the stage. If we made any
concession to art at all, on the same grounds as to
matrimony, it would be only in favour of tragedy, which
should show us that all we think most amiable is an

THE CENSOR AND THE POET 159

illusion, ending in torments and in nothingness. Wedlock
itself would be sanctioned only grudgingly, as a concession
to human frailty, lest a worse thing be ; and we should
marry, if at all very sadly, with fear and trembling and
strictly for the sake of children. Marriage would then not
be the happy-go-lucky, tender, faithful, humorous, trying
fatality which nature has made of it, and which comedy
describes.

Perhaps the emancipated plebeians of the future will
expect their comic poets to play upon sensuality as upon
something altogether innocent and amiable : comic, too,
because all reality is comic, and especially a phase of it
where illusion, jollity, conceit, mishap, and chagrin follow
one another in such quick alternation. If this subject
could be passed by the Censor, and treated judiciously,
it would enrich the arts and at the same time disinfect
the mind in one of its most troubled and sullen moods,
by giving it a merry expression. In the Arabian Nights
I find something of this kind ; but erotic art in Europe,
even in antiquity, seems to have been almost always ,
constrained and vicious. A man who is moralized politic- ;
ally, as Europeans are, rather than religiously or poetically
like Orientals, cannot treat natural things naturally. He
respects the uttered feelings of others more than his own
feelings unuttered, and suppresses every manifestation
of himself which a spectator might frown upon, even if
behind the Censor's back everybody would rejoice in it.
So long as this social complication lasts, public art and the
inner life have to flow separately, the one remains conven
tional the other clouded and incoherent. If poets under
these circumstances tried to tell the whole truth, they would
not only offend the public but do a grave injustice to their
theme, and fail to make it explicit, for want of discipline
and grace of expression. It is as well that the Censor,
by imposing silence, keeps them from attempting the
impossible.

160 LATER SOLILOQUIES

38
THE MASK OF THE PHILOSOPHER

AMONGST tragic masks may be counted all systems of
philosophy and religion. So long as they are still plastic
in the mind of their creator, they seem to him to wear
the very lineaments of nature. He cannot distinguish
the comic cast of his own thought ; yet inevitably it shows
the hue and features of his race ; it has its curious idiom
and constitutional grammar, its quite personal rhetoric,
its ridiculous ignorances and incapacities, and when his
work is finished and its expression set, and other people
behold it, it becomes under his name one of the stock
masks or dramatis personae of the moral world. In it
every wrinkle of his soul is eternalized, its old dead passion
persisted in, its open mouth, always with the same rictus,
bawling one deaf thought for ever. Even to himself, if
he could have seen his mind at a distance, it would have
appeared limited and foreign, as to an old man the verses
of his youth, or like one's own figure seen unexpectedly
in a mirror and mistaken at first for another person. His
own system, as much as those of others, would have
seemed to him a mask for the truth, partial, over-emphatic,
exaggerating one feature and distorting another, and
above all severed from the context of nature, as a picture
in a frame, where much may be shown with a wonderfully
distilled beauty, yet without its substance, and without its
changeful setting in the moving world. Yet this fate is
in part a favour. A system, like a tell-tale glass, may reveal
by a trick of reflection many a fact going on behind one's
back. By it the eye of the mind travels where experience
cannot penetrate ; it turns into a spectacle what was
never open to sight, and it disentangles things seen from
the personal accidents of vision. The mask is greater than
the man. In isolating what was important and pertinent
in his thoughts, it rescues his spirit from the contamination
of all alien dyes, and bequeaths it to posterity such as it
would have wished to be.

I

THE VOYAGE OF THE SAINT CHRISTOPHER 161

39
THE VOYAGE OF THE SAINT CHRISTOPHER

THE voyage of Peter's Bark in search of another world has
been less fortunate than that of Columbus. There have
been mutinies on board ; the other world is not yet found.
Soon after this good ship, the Saint Christopher, was
launched from her Phoenician home-port, she had a strange
experience very like that which legend attributes to her
namesake, the sainted ferryman. Her freight at the
beginning seemed to be of the lightest — only living Hopes
and daily Miracles ; and the crossing was to be very
brief, the other shore being plainly visible at a stone's
throw. But that promised land turned out to be a mirage,
lying across the mouth of the port, which really opened
out into a vast ocean. Meantime the cargo too was
strangely transformed ; for whilst the Hopes and Miracles
were still reputed to be on board, they were hidden from
sight and smothered in a litter of Possessions. These
included a great load of Books, a heavy fund of Traditions,
and a multitude of unruly passengers, with their clamorous
wives and children, and all sorts of provender. So over
weighted, the Saint Christopher sank down until the waves
almost covered her deck ; but she was staunch, like the
wading saint when his light burden grew heavier and
heavier, and she laboured on.

Not only was this ship named after a saint — which
in so old a ship is no wonder — but incredible as it may
seem, her captain was a saint too — Saint Simon or (since
these vague roving people often have an alias) Saint Peter.
He had been a fisherman by profession, and had only
become a saint late in life ; a fact which explained his
good seamanship and his bad language. Besides, he did
not pretend to be a saint except in his official capacity,
as captain, and in matters of science and navigation:
in his private life he was frankly not impeccable, and
deprecated any strict scrutiny of it as not to the point.
Not only might there have been some blemishes in his
early career, but even when in command he might have
his faults. People enjoy doing what they can do well

M

162 LATER SOLILOQUIES

from long habit ; and he was perhaps too fond of fishing,
of cursing, and of commanding.

These foibles once brought upon him a serious mutiny.
A large part of the crew, imitating his expressive speech,
cried, " Damn the captain ! " and took to the boats,
saying the ship was rotten and water-logged. They
carried away with them most of the Hopes, whilst scrupu
lously leaving the Miracles alone. In their boats and rafts
they pulled ahead in all directions, covering the sea with
specks for a long distance ; and the captain, after running
down and sinking a few of them in his towering rage, got
used to their existence, made things shipshape again on
board, and fell to observing them, not without some
chucklings of humour, rowing and splashing about,
quarrelling and never getting anywhere, but often merely
drifting and quietly fishing, much in his own old
manner.

The worst mutiny in the Saint Christopher, however,
was of quite another kind. The remaining crew had no
objection to the captain — they were human themselves —
and no desire to paddle their own canoes. But they got
thoroughly weary of sailing day after day into the same
sunset, decided that there was no El Dorado, and insisted
clamorously on putting the ship about. But in what
direction ? Some were for going home ; they said all
talk of another world was nonsense, that those Hopes
and Miracles were worthless, and that the only thing to
do was to return to the old country and live there in the
old way, making the best of it. But the majority said
that such an acknowledgment of defeat and error would
be ignominious ; and that life at home, never really happy,
would now be doubly intolerable. They would never
have set out on so problematical an expedition, had they
found life possible in their native seats. But it had been
horrible. They remembered with a shudder the cruelties
and vanities of their ancestral heathenism. They were
adventurers and mariners by nature. They might be now
bewildered for a moment and discouraged in their explora
tions, but the impulse to hope for the better and to try the
unknown was ineradicable in their breast.

In some of them, indeed, this brave impulse was so

THE VOYAGE OF THE SAINT CHRISTOPHER 163

vigorous, that they now had a sudden intuition of the
romantic principle of life, and harangued their companions
as follows :

" What need, O shipmates, to sail for any port ? The
sailor is not a land animal. How we chafed and stifled
when we lived on terra firma, pent in those horrible stone
dungeons called houses and churches, and compelled to
till those inert and filthy clods, year in and year out — a
most stupefying existence ! Let us sail for the sake of
sailing. It was not in putting forth into this infinite sea
that we were ill-advised, but only in imagining that we
could reach an opposite shore, and that the sea was not
infinite but hemmed about by dead land. That was a
gross illusion. In reality there is no terra firma at all,
but only ships and rafts more or less extensive, covered
over with earth and trees, riding on the water. Fancy
deceived us, when we supposed that our Farth was
anchored in some deeper earth. It floats and drifts upon
a bottomless flood, and will dissolve into it. Do not dream
of any backward voyage, or of reaching home. You will
never find that old home again ; it exists no longer. But
this good ship of ours, with its wind-blown sails, can never
sink and can never stop. If the banners and crosses, which
we still fly in deference to custom, have lost their meaning
for us, other symbols will take their place. We must not
confuse our infinite task with the illusions that may first
have prompted us to undertake it. A brave and an
endless life awaits us, battling with the storms of winter ;
in the summer days, leaping over the waves with the
dolphins and the porpoises ; in the watches of the night
hailing the ever -new constellations which, as we sail
onward, will rise to greet us, and pass over our heads. For
ocean is a river that flows unendingly, and the stars and
clouds are exhalations attendant upon it ; they rise and
soar in great circles perpetually before its course, like loosed
doves before the bounding shell of Galatea."

These words were not at all relished by the majority
of those who listened to them. They were stay-at-homes
by temperament, who had embarked only in the hope of
gain, or of finding peace and plenty in some softer climate.
They were alarmed and disgusted at what they had just

164 LATER SOLILOQUIES

heard, and not being quite sure that it was false, they
denied it with some irritation.

" What folly," they cried, " what nonsense you are talking.
Of course it is the land that is infinite, since it is much better
than the sea ; and the sea is no river, or its water would
be fresh, and you know how brackish and bitter it is :
indeed, but for the rain we have collected in pans and
hogsheads, we should already have died of thirst. This
sea is nothing but a stagnant lake in the midst of the
green earth, one of the myriad salt ponds studded all
over it ; and as for this leaky little ship, which we were
induced to embark in only by fraud, it is not really sea
worthy. The planks and cordage are already rotting,
and how shall we replace them, unless we speedily sight
land — and God grant it may be a civilized country 1 And
look there ! Is not that land on the horizon ! Through the
clearing mists I can discern a lighthouse, quite distinctly ;
and beyond lies a low shore, overhung with smoke. Some
thing tells me this is the New Atlantis described by Bacon.
A prosperous and populous city, full of docks and factories,
where we shall find everything needful — warehouses, shops,
inns, theatres, baths, even churches and chapels of every
sect and denomination. What joy ! "

This sight was so welcome to those heartsick passengers,
that they could not wait for the ship to make fast, though
they steered her straight for the coast, but jumped over
board and eagerly swam ashore. Their example was
contagious. The other party could not bear to be left
behind without experiencing the new life, whatever it
might bring. They reflected that as the land was really a
part of the sea, it was not bad seamanship sometimes to
run aground, that in leaving the ship they would, in a
higher sense, be continuing their voyage, and that they
would not be true to the supreme principle of their
philosophy, which was absolute free-will, if they did not
often change their principles in minor matters. The chief
point was to experience everything. They did not regret
the past, as did their narrow-minded positivistic friends,
simply because it had involved hardships and errors.
Hardships and errors were blessings, if you could only
outgrow them ; and they, in their splendid vitality, knew

THE VOYAGE OF THE SAINT CHRISTOPHER 165

how to outgrow everything. Sacred history, classic fable,
chivalry, and the cure of one's soul had, in that former
age, proved absorbing themes for the fancy, and had
exquisitely modulated the emotions ; but the fountain
of those emotions had always been their own breast, and
since after such dramatic adventures their breast remained
deeply unsatisfied, it was time to look again narrowly into
its depths to discover some newer and truer way of ex
pressing it. Why should not the development of material
arts be the next phase in their career ? They would not
be less free amid the gusts and the billows of politics than
they had been in their marine adventure ; commerce would
offer them glorious opportunities to exercise their will
power and their invention ; infinite vistas, here too, were
open before them : cities always more populous, possessions
always more varied, instruments always more wonderful,
and labour always more intense.

The romantic party accordingly joined the lovers of
material progress in their new city, called Mechanapolis :
but the old opposition in their temperaments remained
undiminished. The lovers of adventure wanted machines
in order to make war, and the lovers of thrift wanted
peace in order to make other machines.

Meantime Peter the captain, with much grumbling and
shaking of his grey beard, had got the old Saint Christopher
afloat again, and accompanied still by a faithful boatswain
and cook, and some nondescript recruits that he had got
together, set out again to sea, in search of that other land
beyond the ocean which is called heaven. And every
evening with a trembling finger he pointed to it in the
setting sun, not seeing that heaven was above his head.

40
CLASSIC LIBERTY

WHEN ancient peoples defended what they called their
liberty, the word stood for a plain and urgent interest of
theirs : that their cities should not be destroyed, their
territory pillaged, and they themselves sold into slavery.

166 LATER SOLILOQUIES

For the Greeks in particular liberty meant even more
than this. Perhaps the deepest assumption of classic philo
sophy is that nature and the gods on the one hand and
man on the other, both have a fixed character ; that there
is consequently a necessary piety, a true philosophy, a
standard happiness, a normal art. The Greeks believed,
not without reason, that they had grasped these permanent
principles better than other peoples. They had largely
dispelled superstition, experimented in government, and
turned life into a rational art. Therefore when they
defended their liberty what they defended was not merely
freedom to live. It was freedom to live well, to live as
other nations did not, in the public experimental study of
the world and of human nature. This liberty to discover
and pursue a natural happiness, this liberty to grow wise
and to live in friendship with the gods and with one another,
was the liberty vindicated at Thermopylae by martyrdom
and at Salamis by victory.

As Greek cities stood for liberty in the world, so
philosophers stood for liberty in the Greek cities. In
both cases it was the same kind of liberty, not freedom to
wander at hazard or to let things slip, but on the contrary
freedom to legislate more precisely, at least for oneself,
and to discover and codify the means to true happiness.
Many of these pioneers in wisdom were audacious radicals
and recoiled from no paradox. Some condemned what
was most Greek : mythology, athletics, even multiplicity
and physical motion. In the heart of those thriving,
loquacious, festive little ant-hills, they preached impassi
bility and abstraction, the unanswerable scepticism of
silence. Others practised a musical and priestly refinement
of life, filled with metaphysical mysteries, and formed
secret societies, not without a tendency to political
domination. The cynics railed at the conventions, making
themselves as comfortable as possible in the rdle of
beggars and mocking parasites. The conservatives them
selves were radical, so intelligent were they, and Plato
wrote the charter of the most extreme militarism and
communism, for the sake of preserving the free state. It
was the swan-song of liberty, a prescription to a diseased
old man to become young again and try a second life

CLASSIC LIBERTY 167

of superhuman virtue. The old man preferred simply
to die.

Many laughed then, as we may be tempted to do, at
all those absolute physicians of the soul, each with his
panacea. Yet beneath their quarrels the wranglers had a
common faith. They all believed there was a single solid
natural wisdom to be found, that reason could find it, and
that mankind, sobered by reason, could put it in practice.
Mankind has continued to run wild and like barbarians to
place freedom in their very wildness, till we can hardly <
conceive the classic assumption of Greek philosophers and
cities, that true liberty is bound up with an institution, a
corporate scientific discipline, necessary to set free the
perfect man, or the god, within us.

Upon the dissolution of paganism the Christian church
adopted the classic conception of liberty. Of course, the
field in which the higher politics had to operate was now
conceived differently, and there was a new experience of
the sort of happiness appropriate and possible to man ;
but the assumption remained unchallenged that Providence,
as well as the human soul, had a fixed discoverable scope,
and that the business of education, law, and religion was
to bring them to operate in harmony. The aim of life,
salvation, was involved in the nature of the soul itself,
and the means of salvation had been ascertained by a
positive science which the church was possessed of, partly
revealed and partly experimental. Salvation was simply
what, on a broad view, we should see to be health, and
religion was nothing but a sort of universal hygiene.

The church, therefore, little as it tolerated heretical
liberty, the liberty of moral and intellectual dispersion, felt
that it had come into the world to set men free, and
constantly demanded liberty for itself, that it might fulfil
this mission. It was divinely commissioned to teach, guide,
and console all nations and all ages by the self-same
means, and to promote at all costs what it conceived to
be human perfection. There should be saints and as many
saints as possible. The church never admitted, any more
than did any sect of ancient philosophers, that its teaching
might represent only an eccentric view of the world, or
that its guidance and consolations might be suitable only

168 LATER SOLILOQUIES

at one stage of human development. To waver in the
pursuit of the orthodox ideal could only betray frivolity
and want of self-knowledge. The truth of things and the
happiness of each man could not lie elsewhere than where
the church, summing up all human experience and all
divine revelation, had placed it once for all and for every
body. The liberty of the church to fulfil its mission was
accordingly hostile to any liberty of dispersion, to any
radical consecutive independence, in the life of individuals
or of nations.

When it came to full fruition this orthodox freedom was
far from gay ; it was called sanctity. The freedom of
pagan philosophers too had turned out to be rather a stiff
and severe pose ; but in the Christian dispensation this
austerity of true happiness was less to be wondered at,
since life on earth was reputed to be abnormal from the
beginning, and infected with hereditary disease. The fall
beauty and joy of restored liberty could hardly become
evident in this life. Nevertheless a certain beauty and
joy did radiate visibly from the saints ; and while we
may well think their renunciations and penances misguided
or excessive, it is certain that, like the Spartans and the
philosophers, they got something for their pains. Their
bodies and souls were transfigured, as none now found
upon earth. If we admire without imitating them we shall
perhaps have done their philosophy exact justice. Classic
liberty was a sort of forced and artificial liberty, a poor
perfection reserved for an ascetic aristocracy in whom
heroism and refinement were touched with perversity and
slowly starved themselves to death.

Since those days we have discovered how much larger
the universe is, and we have lost our way in it. Any day
it may come over us again that our modern liberty to drift
in the dark is the most terrible negation of freedom.
Nothing happens to us as we would. We want peace and
make war. We need science and obey the will to believe,
we love art and flounder among whimsicalities, we believe
in general comfort and equality and we strain every nerve
to become millionaires. After all, antiquity must have
been right in thinking that reasonable self -direction must
rest on having a determinate character and knowing what

CLASSIC LIBERTY 169

it is, and that only the truth about God and happiness, if
we somehow found it, could make us free. But the truth
is not to be found by guessing at it, as religious prophets
and men of genius have done, and then damning every one
who does not agree. Human nature, for all its substantial
fixity, is a living thing with many varieties and variations.
All diversity of opinion is therefore not founded on
ignorance ; it may express a legitimate change of habit or
interest. The classic and Christian synthesis from which
we have broken loose was certainly premature, even if the
only issue of our liberal experiments should be to lead us
back to some such equilibrium. Let us hope at least that
the new morality, when it comes, may be more broadly
based than the old on knowledge of the world, not so
absolute, not so meticulous, and not chanted so much in
the monotone of an abstracted sage.

GERMAN FREEDOM

THERE is a fine theory of Hegel's that the universe exists
in order to realize freedom. In Oriental despotisms, he
tells us, only one man was free. In ancient republican cities
a minority, the aristocracy of citizens, obtained freedom.
Now at last freedom has extended to all ; not, however, as
we might fondly suppose, in free and casual America, but
under the perfect organization of the Prussian monarchy.
For freedom in the mouth of German philosophers has a
very special meaning. It does not refer to any possibility
of choice nor to any private initiative. It means rather
that sense of freedom which we acquire when we do gladly
and well what we should have to do anyhow, as when
in passing from a close room into the open air we say we
breathe freely at last. German freedom is like the freedom
of the angels in heaven who see the face of God and cannot
sin. It lies in such a deep love and understanding of what
is actually established that you would not have it other
wise ; you appropriate and bless it all and feel it to be
the providential expression of your own spirit. You are

170 LATER SOLILOQUIES

enlarged by sympathy with your work, your country, and
the universe, until you are no longer conscious of the least
distinction between the Creator, the state, and yourself.
Your compulsory service then becomes perfect freedom.

For liberal freedom, for individualism, these philosophers
have a great contempt. They say a man is nothing but
the sum of his relations to other things, and if he should
throw off one after another these constitutive bonds, he
would find his private residuum of a self to be a mathe
matical point and a naked cipher, incapable of willing or of
choosing anything. And they further say that a dutiful
soul is right in feeling that the world it accepts and co
operates with is its own work ; for, according to their
metaphysics, the world is only an idea which each man
makes after his own image, and even as you are, so is the
world you imagine you live in. Only a foolish recalcitrant
person, who does not recognize the handiwork of his own
spirit about him, rebels against it, and thereby cancels
his natural freedom ; for everywhere he finds contradic
tions and closed doors and irksome necessities, being divided
against himself and constantly bidding his left hand undo
what his right hand is doing. So that, paradoxical as it
may seem, it is only when you conform that you are free,
while if you rebel and secede you become a slave. Your
spiritual servitude in such a case would only be manifesting
itself in a phenomenal form if the government should put
you in prison.

The national expression of this kind of freedom is what
the Germans call Kultur, a word not well understood in
other countries. Every nation has certain characteristic
institutions, certain representative writers and statesmen,
past and present, certain forms of art and industry, a
certain type of policy and moral inspiration. These are
its Kultur, its national tradition and equipment. When
by education the individual is brought to understand all
these things, to share their spirit and life, and to be able
to carry them forward faithfully, then he has absorbed
the Kultur in his own person. Kultur is transmitted by
systematic education. It is not, like culture, a matter of
miscellaneous private attainments and refined tastes, but,
rather, participation in a national purpose and in the

GERMAN FREEDOM 171

means of executing it. The adept in this Kultur can live
freely the life of his country, possessing its secret inspiration,
valuing what it pursues and finding his happiness in those
successes which he can help it to attain. Kultur is a lay
religion, which includes ecclesiastical religion and assigns
to it its due place.

German Kultur resembles the polity of ancient cities
and of the Christian church in that it constitutes a definite,
authoritative, earnest discipline, a training which is
practical and is thought to be urgent and momentous.
It is a system to be propagated and to be imposed. It is
all-inclusive and demands entire devotion from everybody.
At the same time it has this great advantage over the
classic systems, that it admits variations. At Sparta,
in Plato's Republic, and in the Catholic church the aims
and constitution of society were expected to remain always
the same. The German ideal, on the contrary, not only
admits evolution, but insists upon it. Like music, it is
essentially a form of movement. According to the
philosophers, however, the form of this movement is fixed
by the absolute genius of the composer, and prescribes
the way in which the changes shall go on. Evolution thus
introduces life into this ideal, but does not admit am
biguities. In this sense the German law of progression
is as inexorable as the classic model of form.

The more reasonable theorists of German Kultur
introduce another qualification, which, if admitted, is of
the greatest importance, namely, that German Kultur is
not to be extended to other nations. Some make a special
point of contrasting the universal claims of the Roman
and Napoleonic empires and of the Catholic church with
the aspirations of German genius, which, they say, is infinite
inwardly, being capable of endless growth and modification
by men of Teutonic blood, yet is limited externally or in
space, in that it is not communicable to other races. Non-
Teutons should never be summoned, therefore, to acquire
the German spirit, which they would only pollute. Their
proper r61e is rather to stand by, no doubt overawed and
filled with admiration, but left without hope or fear of
being assimilated. Yet as the church could admit that
there might be unconscious and virtual Christians among

172 LATER SOLILOQUIES

the heathen, who might by exception be saved, so there
may be sporadic manifestations of Teutonic genius in
unforeseen quarters. Shakespeare, Dante, and Christ
were virtual and unconscious Germans.

There is, of course, a less indulgent Germanism, which
has on its side the authority of Fichte and Hegel, the
enthusiasm of the pan-Germans and that lust for boundless
ascendancy which enterprise and war naturally foster in
anybody who has carried them on passionately and success
fully. According to this stricter view, the whole world
is to be subjugated and purified by the German nation,
which alone inherits the undefiled language and religion
of Eden, and must assign to the remaining Creole races,
descended from savages and ultimately perhaps from
monkeys or devils, such tasks as they are capable of.
The masters, being by nature generous and kind, will
\ allow their slaves, after their work is done, to bask in
\ despicable happiness, since happiness is all that slaves are
capable of living for ; but they will be proudly commanded
by a race of hard, righteous, unhappy, heroic German
experts, with blue eyes fixed on the eternal ideal.

The admission that German Kultur is merely national,
which might seem to promise peace and goodwill, may
be turned in this way into a sinister claim to absolute
dominion. The ancients and the church had supposed
that all men, though endowed with talent and goodness
in the most various degrees, had qualitatively the same
nature. The same passions, the same arts, and the same
salvation were proper to them all. The servant, in further
ing the aims of his betters, served what his own soul
potentially loved and was capable of appropriating ; there
could be religion and love in his subordination. Recipro
cally the master could feel respect and affection for his
servants, who were his wards and his god-children. The
best things in classic life — religion, poetry, comradeship,
moral sagacity — were shared by the humblest classes and
expressed their genius. The temple, the church, the agora,
the theatre, Socrates, and the saints were of the people.

German Kultur, on the contrary, boasts that it is not
the expression of diffused human nature, but the product
of a special and concentrated free will. It is therefore

GERMAN FREEDOM 173

incommunicable, unrepresentative. It is not felt by
any one else to realize his ideal, but seems foreign to
him, forced and unamiable. Every nation loves its
idiosyncrasies and, until it reflects, thinks its own balance
of faculties, like its language, more natural than other
people's. But the prophets of Germanism have turned
this blameless love of home and its sanctities into a
deliberate dogma that everything German has a divine
superiority. This dogma they have foisted on a flattered
and trustful nation, with the command to foist it on the
rest of the world. The fatuity of this is nothing new, many
nations and religions having shared it in their day, and
we could afford to laugh at it, if by direct and indirect
coercion it did not threaten to trespass upon our liberties.
What is universally acceptable in German Kultur is
what it contains that is not German but human, what with
praiseworthy docility it has borrowed from the ancients,
from Christianity, from the less intentional culture of its
modern neighbours. The Teutonic accent which these
elements have acquired is often very engaging ; it adds to
them a Gothic charm for the lack of which mankind would
be the poorer. But the German manner, in art, in philo
sophy, in government, is no better — in its broad appeal to
human nature we may fairly say it is worse — than the
classic manner which it hopes to supersede. It is avowedly
a product of will, arbitrary, national, strained ; it is not
superior to what other nations possess or may create but
only different, not advanced but eccentric. To study it
and use it for a stimulus may be profitable in times and
places of spiritual famine or political chaos, but to impose it
as normal, not to say as supreme, would be a plain invasion
of human liberty.

42
LIBERALISM AND CULTURE

MODERN reformers, religious and political, have usually
retained the classic theory of orthodoxy, namely, that
there is one right or true system — democracy and free
thought, for instance — which it is the reformer's duty to

174 LATER SOLILOQUIES

establish in the place of prevalent abuses. Certainly
Luther and Calvin and the doctrinaires of the French
revolution only meant to substitute one orthodoxy for
another, and what they set forth they regarded as valid
for all men and forever. Nevertheless they had a greater
success in discrediting the received system than in establish
ing their own, and the general effect of their reforms was
to introduce the modern conception of liberty, the liberty
of liberalism.

This consists in limiting the prescriptions of the law
to a few points, for the most part negative, leaving it to
the initiative and conscience of individuals to order their
life and conversation as they like, provided only they do
not interfere with the same freedom in others. In practice
liberal countries have never reached this ideal of peaceful
anarchy, but have continued to enforce state education,
monogamy, the vested rights of property, and sometimes
military service. But within whatever limits, liberty is
understood to lie in the individual being left alone, so that
he may express his personal impulses as he pleases in word
and action.

A philosopher can readily see that this liberal ideal
implies a certain view about the relations of man in the
universe. It implies that the ultimate environment, divine
or natural, is either chaotic in itself or undiscoverable by
human science, and that human nature, too, is either
radically various or only determinable in a few essentials,
round which individual variations play ad libitum. For
this reason no normal religion, science, art, or way of
happiness can be prescribed. These remain always open,
even in their foundations, for each man to arrange for
himself. The more things are essentially unsettled and
optional, the more liberty of this sort there may safely
be in the world and the deeper it may run.

Man, however, is a gregarious animal, and much more
so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone
for a walk, but hates to stand alone in his opinions. And
he is so imitative that what he thinks he most wishes to
do is whatever he sees other people doing. Hence if
compulsory organization disappears a thousand free and
private organizations at once take its place. Virginal

LIBERALISM AND CULTURE 175

liberty is good only to be surrendered at the right time to
a right influence. A state in which government is limited
to police duty must allow churches, universities (with
millionaires to found them), public sports, private charities,
masonic or monastic orders, and every other sort of party
institution, to flourish within it unhindered ; otherwise
that state would hardly be civilized and nothing of import
ance would ever be done in it. Yet the prevalence of such
free associations will jeopardize the perfect liberty which
individuals are supposed to enjoy. Private organizations
are meddlesome ; if they cannot impose themselves by
force, they insinuate themselves by propaganda, and no
paternal government ever exerted so pervasive and
indiscreet an influence as they know how to acquire.
Fashions in speech or clothes are harder to evade than
any laws, and religion, when it is chosen and sectarian,
eats more into the soul than when it is established and
conventional. In a society honeycombed by private
societies a man finds his life supervised, his opportunities
pre-empted, his conscience intimidated, and his pocket
drained. Every one he meets informs him of a new duty
and presents him with a new subscription list. At every
turn he must choose between being incorporated or being
ostracized. Indeed, the worst and most radical failure in
his fabled liberty of choice is that he never had a choice
about his environment or about his faculties, and has to
take his luck as to his body, his mind, his position, his
country, and his family. Even where he may cast a vote
his vote is far from decisive. In electing a government,
as in selecting a wife, only two or three candidates are
commonly available, and the freeman's modest privilege
is to declare hopefully which one he wants and then to
put up with the one he gets.

If liberalism had been a primitive system, with no
positive institutions behind it, it would have left human
genius in the most depressed and forlorn condition. The
organized part of life would have been a choice among
little servitudes, and the free personal part would have
been a blank. Fortunately, liberal ages have been
secondary ages, inheriting the monuments, the feelings,
and the social hierarchy of previous times, when men had

i?6 LATER SOLILOQUIES

lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned
religion, one style of art, one political order, one common
spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism has come to
remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions
without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most
people retain their preliberal heritage and hardly remember
that they are legally free to abandon it and to sample
any and every other form of life. Liberalism does not
go very deep ; it is an adventitious principle, a mere
loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings
to all who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and
relief. It offers them an escape from all sorts of accidental
tyrannies. It opens to them that sweet, scholarly, tenderly
moral, critically superior attitude of mind which Matthew
Arnold called culture.

Primitive, dragooned, unanimous ages cannot possess
culture. What they possess is what the Germans call a
Kultur, some type or other of manners, laws, implements,
arts, religion. When these national possessions are per
used and relished by some individual who does not take
them for granted and who understands and judges them
as if from outside, his acquaintance with them becomes
an element in his culture ; and if he is at home in many
such forms of life and thought, his culture is the more
perfect. It should ideally be culled from everywhere.
Culture is a triumph of the individual over society. It
is his way of profiting intellectually by a world he has
not helped to make.

Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and
liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture
that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism
so dangerously disperses in practice. Out of the public
disarray of beliefs and efforts it gathers its private collec
tion of curiosities, much as amateurs stock their museums
with fragments of ancient works. It possesses a wealth of
vicarious experience and historical insight which comforts
it for having nothing of its own to contribute to history.
The man of culture abounds in discriminating senti
ments ; he lives under the distant influence of exalted
minds ; his familiar thoughts at breakfast are intimate
appreciations of poetry and art, and if his culture is

LIBERALISM AND CULTURE 177

really mellow, he sometimes smiles a little at his own
culture.

Culture came into the modern world with the renaissance,
when personal humours and remote inspiration broke in
upon the consecrated mediaeval mind. Piety and learn
ing had their intrinsic charms, but, after all, they had
been cultivated for the sake of ulterior duties and benefits,
and in order to appropriate and hand down the revealed
wisdom which opened the way to heaven. Culture, on
the contrary, had no ulterior purpose, no forced unity.
It was an aroma inhaled by those who walked in the
evening in the garden of life. Far from being a means to
religion, it threw religion also into the context of human
experience, and touched its mysteries and quarrels with
judgement and elegance. It liberated the studious mind
from obligatory or national discipline, and as far as possible
from all bonds of time, place, utility, and co-operation,
kindling sympathies by preference with what was most
exotic, and compensating the mind for the ignominious
necessity of having to be, in practical matters, local and
partisan. Culture was courteous, open, uncons:ious of
self ; it was the joy of living every life but one's own.
And its moral side — for everything has its moral side — lay in
the just judgements it fostered, the clear sense it awakened
of the different qualities and values of things. The scale
of values established by the man of culture might sometimes
be fanciful or frivolous, but he was always most scrupulous,
according to his lights, in distinguishing the better from
the worse. This conscientiousness, after all, is the only
form of morality that a liberal society can insist upon.

The days of liberalism are numbered. First the horrors
of competition discredited it, and now the trial of war,
which it foolishly thought it could elude. The vogue of
culture, too, has declined. We see that the man whose
success is merely personal — the actor, the sophist, the
millionaire, the aesthete — is incurably vulgar. The right-
ness of liberalism is exactly proportional to the diversity
of human nature, to its vague hold on its ideals. Where
this vagueness and play of variation stop, and they stop
not far below the surface, the sphere of public organization
should begin. It is in the subsoil of uniformity, of tradition,

N

178 LATER SOLILOQUIES

of dire necessity that human welfare is rooted, together
with wisdom and unaffected art, and the flowers of culture
that do not draw their sap from that soil are only paper
flowers.

43
THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such
matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible,
yet modern liberalism wants them together. Liberals
believe that free inquiry, free invention, free association,
and free trade are sure to produce prosperity. I have no
doubt they are right in this ; the nineteenth century,
that golden age of liberalism, certainly saw a great increase
in wealth, in science, and in comforts. What the ancients
had before them was a different side of the question ;
they had no experience of liberalism ; they expected to be
state-ridden in their religion, their customs, and their
military service ; even in their personal and family morals
they did not begrudge the strictest discipline ; their states
needed to be intensely unified, being small and in constant
danger of total destruction. Under these circumstances
it seemed clear to them that prosperity, however it might
have been produced, was dangerous to liberty. Prosperity
brought power ; and when a people exercises control over
other peoples its government becomes ponderous even at
home ; its elaborate machinery cannot be stopped, and
can hardly be mended ; the imperial people becomes the
slave of its commitments. Moreover, prosperity requires
inequalities of function and creates inequalities of fortune ;
and both too much work and too much wealth kill liberty
in the individual. They involve subjection to things ;
and this is contrary to what the ancients, who had the
pride of noble animals, called freedom. Prosperity, both
for individuals and for states, means possessions ; and
possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery ; and
slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich
man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his
judgement, and the range of his thoughts.

THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM 179

I often wonder, looking at my rich friends, how far their
possessions are facilities and how far they are impediments.
The telephone, for instance, is a facility if you wish to be
in many places at once and to attend to anything that
may turn up ; it is an impediment if you are happy where
you are and in what you are doing. Public motor-vehicles,
public libraries, and public attendants (such as waiters in
hotels, when they wait) are a convenience, which even
the impecunious may enjoy ; but private automobiles,
private collections of books or pictures, and private servants
are, to my thinking, an encumbrance : but then I am an old
fogy and almost an ancient philosopher, and I don't count.
I prize civilization, being bred in towns and liking to hear
and to see what new things people are up to. I like to
walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the
world ; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort
of personal possessions, because they would take away my
liberty.

Perhaps what liberalism aspires to marry with liberty
is not so much prosperity as progress. Progress means
continued change for the better ; and it is obvious that
liberty will conduce to progress in all those things, such as
writing poetry, which a man can pursue without aid or
interference from others : where aid is requisite and
interference probable, as in politics, liberty conduces to
progress only in so far as people are unanimous, and
spontaneously wish to move in the same direction. Now
what is the direction of change which seems progress to
liberals ? A pure liberal might reply, The direction of
liberty itself : the ideal is that every man should move
in whatever direction he likes, with the aid of such as
agree with him, and without interfering with those who
disagree. Liberty so conceived would be identical with
happiness, with spontaneous life, blamelessly and safely
lived ; and the impulse of liberalism, to give everybody
what he wants, in so far as that is possible, would be
identical with simple kindness. Benevolence was one of
the chief motives in liberalism in the beginning, and many
a liberal is still full of kindness in his private capacity ; but
politically, as a liberal, he is something more than kind.
The direction in which many, or even most, people would

i8o LATER SOLILOQUIES

like to move fills him with disgust and indignation ; he
does not at all wish them to be happy, unless they can be
happy on his own diet ; and being a reformer and a
philanthropist, he exerts himself to turn all men into the
sort of men he likes, so as to be able to like them. It
would be selfish, he thinks, to let people alone. They
must be helped, and not merely helped to what they
desire — that might really be very bad for them — but helped
onwards, upwards, in the right direction. Progress could
not be rightly placed in a smaller population, a simpler
economy, more moral diversity between nations, and
stricter moral discipline in each of them. That would be
progress backwards, and if it made people happier, it
would not make the liberal so. Progress, if it is to please
him, must continue in the direction in which the nine
teenth century progressed, towards vast numbers, material
complexity, moral uniformity, and economic interdepend
ence. The best little boy, for instance, according to the
liberal ideal, desires to be washed, to go to school,
to do Swedish exercises, and to learn everything out of
books. But perhaps the individual little boy (and accord
ing to the liberal philosophy his individuality is sacred,
and the only judge of what is good or true for him is his
own consciousness) desires to go dirty, to make mud-pies
in the street, and to learn everything by experience or by
report from older boys. When the philanthropist runs
up to the rescue, this little ingrate snivels at him the
very principle of liberal liberty, " Let me alone." To
inform such an urchin that he does not know what is good
for him, that he is a slave to bad habits and devilish
instincts, that true freedom for him can only come of
correcting himself, until he has learned to find happiness
in virtue — plainly that would be to abandon liberalism,
and to preach the classical doctrine that the good is not
liberty but wisdom. Liberalism was a protest against
just such assumptions of authority. It emphatically
refused to pursue an eventual stoical freedom, absurdly
so called, which was to come when we had given up every
thing we really wanted — the mock freedom of service.
In the presence of the little boy liberal philosophy takes a
middle course. It is convinced — though it would not do

THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM 181

to tell him so prematurely — that he must be allowed to
go dirty for a time, until sufficient experience of filth teaches
him how much more comfortable it is to be clean ; also
that he will go to school of his own accord if the books
have pictures enough in them, and if the teacher begins
by showing him how to make superior mud-pies. As to
morals and religion, the boy and his companions will
evolve the appropriate ones in time out of their own
experience, and no others would be genuine.

Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical
and British in order to become German and transcendental.
Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty
and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures ;
it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a
series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding
one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire
anything but what the best people desire. This is the
principle of the higher snobbery ; and in fact, all earnest
liberals are higher snobs. If you refuse to move in the
prescribed direction, you are not simply different, you are
arrested and perverse. The savage must not remain a
savage, nor the nun a nun, and China must not keep its
wall. If the animals remain animals it is somehow through
a failure of the will in them, and very sad. Classic liberty,
though only a name for stubborn independence, and
obedience to one's own nature, was too free, in one way,
for the modern liberal. It accepted all sorts of perfections,
animal, human, and divine, as final after their kind, each
the seat of a sufficient virtue and happiness. It was
polytheistic. Between master and slave, between man
and woman, it admitted no moral advance or develop
ment ; they were, or might be, equally perfect. Inequality
was honourable ; amongst the humblest there could be
dignity and sweetness ; the higher snobbery would have
been absurd, because if you were not content to be what
you were now, how could you ever be content with any
thing ? But the transcendental principle of progress is
pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in
its own house ; no one can be really free or happy but
all must be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same
compulsory voyage, to the same unhomely destination.

182 LATER SOLILOQUIES

The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns.
In the interval, happiness is not to be found in being a fixed
star, as bright and pure as possible, even if only for a
season ; happiness is to flow and dissolve in sympathy
with one's higher destiny.

The notion of progress is thus merged with that of
universal evolution, dropping the element of liberty and
even of improvement. Nevertheless, in the political
expression of liberalism, liberty took the first innings.
Protestants began by asserting the right of private judge
ment in interpreting scripture ; transcendentajists ended
by asserting the divine right of the individual to impose
his own spirit on everything he touched. His duty to
himself, which was also his deepest instinct, was to suck
in from the widest possible field all that was congenial to
him, and to reject, down to his very centre, whatever
might thwart or offend. Sometimes he carried his con
sistency in egotism to the length of denying that anything
he could not digest could possibly exist, or that the material
world and foreign nations were more than ideal pawns
in the game he played with himself for his self -development.
Even when not initiated into these transcendental mysteries,
he was filled with practical self-trust, the desire to give
himself freedom, and the belief that he deserved it. There
was no need of exploring anything he was not tempted
to explore ; he had an equal right to his opinion, whatever
the limits of his knowledge ; and he should be coerced as
little as possible in his action. In specific matters, for the
sake of expediency, he might be willing to yield to the
majority ; but only when his vote had been counted, and as
a sort of insurance against being disturbed in his residual
liberty.

There was a general conviction behind all these maxims,
that tradition corrupts experience. All sensation — which
is the test of matters of fact — is somebody's sensation ; all
reasoning is somebody's reasoning, and vitally persuasive
as it first comes ; but when transmitted the evidence loses
its edge, words drop their full meaning, and inert conven
tions falsify the insights of those who had instituted them.
Therefore, reform, revision, restatement are perpetually
required : any individual, according to this view, who

THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM 183

honestly corrected tradition was sure to improve upon it.
Whatsoever was not the fresh handiwork of the soul and
true to its present demand was bad for that soul. A
man without traditions, if he could only be materially
well equipped, would be purer, more rational, more
virtuous than if he had been an heir to anything. Weh dir,
dass du ein Enkel bist ! Blessed are the orphans, for they
shall deserve to have children ; blessed the American !
Philosophy should be transcendental, history romantic and
focussed in one's own country, politics democratic, and
art individual and above convention. Variety in religious
dogma would only prove the truth — that is, the inwardness
— of inspiration.

Yet if this transcendental freedom had been the whole
of liberalism, would not the animals, such of them at
least as are not gregarious, have been the most perfect
liberals ? Are they not ruled wholly from within ? Do
they not enjoy complete freedom of conscience and of
expression ? Does Mrs. Grundy interfere with their
spontaneous actions ? Are they ever compelled to fight
except by their own impulse and in their private interest ?
Yet it was not the ideal of liberalism to return to nature ;
far from it. It admonished the dogs not to bark and bite,
even if, in the words of the sacred poet, " it is their nature
to." Dogs, according to transcendental philosophy, ought
to improve their nature, and to behave better. A chief
part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace, safety,
comfort, and general information ; it aimed at stable
wealth, it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It
was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder instincts of
man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting, of
plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an
acute, a sickening horror of suffering ; to be cruel was
devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal. I am
afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean ; it was
Victorian ; it was tame. In inviting every man to be
free and autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would
wish to be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How
could he possibly fail to covet a way of life which, in the
eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best ? It must have
been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable,

184 LATER SOLILOQUIES

that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal
system has ever liked it.

What about liberty in love ? If there is one ingenuous
and winged creature among the immortals, it is Eros ;
the freer and more innocent love is, the more it will flutter,
the farther it will range, and the higher it will soar. But
at the touch of matter, of conditions, of consequences,
how all its freedom shrivels, or turns into tragedy ! What
prohibitions, what hypocrisies, what responsibilities, what
sorrows ! The progress of civilization compels love to
respect the limits set to it by earlier vows, by age, sex,
class, race, religion, blood relationship, and even fictitious
relationship ; bounds of which the impertinent Eros him
self knows nothing. Society smothers the imp altogether
in the long christening-clothes of domestic affection and
religious duty. What was once a sensuous intoxication,
a mystic rapture, an enchanted friendship, becomes all a
question of money, of habit, of children. British liberalism
has been particularly cruel to love ; in the Victorian era all
its amiable impulses were reputed indecent, until a marriage
certificate suddenly rendered them godly, though still
unmentionable. And what liberty does even the latest
radicalism offer to the heart ? Liberty to be divorced ;
divorced at great expense, with shabby perjuries and
public scandal, probably in order to be at once married
again, until the next divorce. Was it not franker and
nobler to leave love, as in Spain, to the poets ; to let the
stripling play the guitar as much as he liked in the moon
light, exchange passionate glances, whisper daily at the
lattice, and then, dressing the bride in black, to dismiss
free fancy at the church door, saying : Henceforth let
thy names be charity and fidelity and obedience ?

It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul ;
that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy ; but
liberalism may bring large opportunities for achievement
in a man's outward life. It intensifies — because it renders
attainable — the lure of public distinction, of luxury, of
love surrounded by refined pleasures. The liberal state
stimulates the imagination of an ambitious man to the
highest degree. Those who have a good start in the
universal competition, or sharp wits, or audacity, will

THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM 185

find plenty of prizes awaiting them. With the pride of
wealth, when it is great, there comes the pride of
munificence ; in the suburbs of wealth there is culture,
and in its service there is science. When science can
minister to wealth and intelligence to dominion, both can
be carried on the shoulders of the plutocracy which
dominates the liberal state ; and they can fill it with
innumerable comforts and marvellous inventions. At the
same time, nothing will hinder the weaker members of
rich families from becoming clergymen or even scholars
or artists ; or they may range over the five continents,
hunt whatever wild beasts remain in the jungle, and write
books about savages.

Whether these prizes offered by liberal society are worth
winning, I cannot say from experience, never having desired
them ; but the aspects of modern life which any one may
observe, and the analytic picture of it which the novelists
supply, are not very attractive. Wealth is always, even
when most secure, full of itch and fear ; worry about
health, children, religion, marriage, servants ; and the
awful question of where to live, when one may live any
where, and yet all seems to depend on the choice. For
the politician, politics are less important than his private
affairs, and less interesting than bridge ; and he has always
a party, or a wicked opposition, on which to throw the
blame if his careless measures turn out badly. No one in
office can be a true statesman, because a true statesman
is consistent, and public opinion will never long support
any consistent course. What the successful man in
modern society really most cares about is love ; love for
him is a curious mixture of sensuality, vanity, and friend
ship ; it lights up all the world of his thought and action
with its secret and unsteady flame. Even when mutual and
legal, it seems to be three-quarters anxiety and sorrow ;
for if nothing worse happens to lovers, they grow old. I
hear no laughter among the rich which is not forced and
nervous. I find no sense of moral security amongst them, no
happy freedom, no mastery over anything. Yet this is the
very cream of liberal life, the brilliant success for the sake
of which Christendom was overturned, and the dull peasantry
elevated into factory-hands, shopkeepers, and chauffeurs.

186 LATER SOLILOQUIES

When the lists are open to all, and the one aim of life
is to live as much as possible like the rich, the majority
must needs be discouraged. The same task is proposed
to unequal strengths, and the competition emphasizes
the inequality. There was more encouragement for
mediocre people when happiness was set before them in
mediocrity, or in excellence in some special craft. Now
the mass, hopelessly out of the running in the race for
wealth, falls out and drifts into squalor. Since there is
liberty, the listless man will work as little and drink as
much as he can ; he will crawl into whatever tenement
he can get cheapest, seek the society in which least effort
is demanded and least shame is felt, have as many children
as improvidence sends him, let himself out, at a pinch,
for whatever service and whatever wages he can obtain,
drift into some syndicated servitude or some great migra
tion, or sink in solitude into the deepest misery. He then
becomes a denizen of those slimy quarters, under the shadow
of railway bridges, breweries, and gas-works, where the
blear lights of a public -house peer through the rain at
every corner, and offer him the one joy remaining in life ;
for Joy is not to be mentioned in the same breath as the
female prowling by the door, hardly less befuddled and
bedraggled than the lurching idlers whom she endeavours
to entice ; but perhaps God does not see all this, because
a pall hangs over it perpetually of impenetrable smoke.
The liberal system, which sought to raise the individual,
has degraded the masses ; and this on so vast a scale and
to so pitiable a degree, that the other element in liberalism,
philanthropic zeal, has come again to the fore. Liberty go
hang, say the new radicals ; let us save the people. Liberal
legislation, which was to have reduced government to the
minimum of police control, now has undertaken public educa
tion, social reform, and even the management of industry.

This happy people can read. It supports a press
conforming to the tastes of the common man, or rather to
such tastes as common men can have in common ; for the
best in each is not diffused enough to be catered for in
public. Moreover, this press is audaciously managed by
some adventitious power, which guides it for its own
purposes, commercial or sectarian. Superstitions old and

THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM 187

new thrive in this infected atmosphere ; they are now all
treated with a curious respect, as if nobody could have
anything to object to them. It is all a scramble of
prejudices and rumours ; whatever first catches the ear
becomes a nucleus for all further presumptions and
sympathies. Advertising is the modern substitute for
argument, its function is to make the worse appear the
better article. A confused competition of all propagandas
— those insults to human nature — is carried on by the
most expert psychological methods, which the art of
advertising has discovered ; for instance, by always
repeating a lie, when it has been exposed, instead of
retracting it. The world at large is deafened ; but each
propaganda makes its little knot of proselytes, and inspires
them with a new readiness to persecute and to suffer in
the sacred cause. The only question is, which propaganda
can first materially reach the greatest number of persons,
and can most efficaciously quench all the others. At
present, it looks as if the German, the Catholic, and the
communist propaganda had the best chances ; but these
three are divergent essentially (though against a common
enemy they may work for a while together, as they did
during this war), and they appeal to different weaknesses
of human nature ; they are alike, however, in being equally
illiberal, equally " rucksichtlos " and " bose," equally
regardless of the harm they may do, and accounting it
all an added glory, like baiting the devil. By giving a
free rein to such propagandas, and by disgusting the people
with too much optimism, toleration, and neutrality,
liberalism has introduced a new reign of unqualified ill-
will. Hatred and wilfulness are everywhere ; nations
and classes are called to life on purpose to embody them ;
they are summoned by their leaders to shake off the
lethargy of contentment and to become conscious of their
existence and of their terrible wrongs. These propagandas
have taken shape in the blue sky of liberalism, like so
many summer clouds ; they seem airships sailing under a
flag of truce ; but they are engines of war, and on the
first occasion they will hoist their true colours, and break
the peace which allowed them to cruise over us so leisurely.
Each will try to establish its universal ascendancy by force,

i88 LATER SOLILOQUIES

in contempt of personal freedom, or the voice of majorities.
It will rely, against the apathy and vagueness of the million,
on concentrated zeal in its adepts. Minorities everywhere
have their way ; and majorities, grown familiar with pro
jects that at first shocked them, decide one fine morning
that there may be no harm in them after all, and follow
like sheep. Every trade, sect, private company, and
aspiring nation, finding some one to lead it, asserts itself
" ruthlessly " against every other. Incipient formations
in the body politic, cutting across and subverting its old
constitution, eat one another up, like different species of
animals ; and the combat can never cease except some
day, perhaps, for lack of combatants. Liberalism has
merely cleared a field in which every soul and every
corporate interest may fight with every other for domina
tion. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make
an end of liberalism ; and the new order, which will deem
itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age
against a new crop of rebels.

For myself, even if I could live to see it, I should not
be afraid of the future domination, whatever it may be.
One has to live in some age, under some fashion ; I have
found, in different times and places, the liberal, the Catholic,

iand the German air quite possible to breathe ; nor, I am
sure, would communism be without its advantages to a
j free mind, and its splendid emotions. Fanatics, as Tacitus
said of the Jews or Christians, are consumed with hatred
of the human race, which offends them ; yet they are
themselves human ; and nature in them takes its revenge,
and something reasonable and sweet bubbles up out of
the very fountain of their madness. Once established in
the world the new dispensation forms a ruling caste, a
conventional morality, a standard of honour ; safety and
happiness soften the heart of the tyrant. Aristocracy
knows how to kiss the ruddy cheeks of its tenants' children ;
and before mounting its thoroughbred horse at the park
gates, it pats him with a gloved hand, and gives him a
lump of sugar ; nor does it forget to ask the groom, with a
kindly interest, when he is setting out for the war. Poor
flunkey ! The demagogues will tell him he is a fool, to
let himself be dragooned into a regiment, and marched off

THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM 189

to endure untold privations, death, or ghastly wounds,
all for some fantastic reason which is nothing to him.
It is a hard fate ; but can this world promise anybody
anything better ? For the moment he will have a smart
uniform ; beers and lasses will be obtainable ; many-
comrades will march by his side ; and he may return, if
he is lucky, to work again in his master's stables, lounge
at the public-house, and bounce his children on his knee
amongst the hollyhocks before his cottage. Would the
demagogues give him better prospects, or prove better
masters ? Would he be happier with no masters at all ?
Consider the demagogues themselves, and their history.
They found themselves in the extreme of misery ; but
even this is a sort of distinction, and marks off a new
species, seizing new weapons in the struggle for existence.
The scum of the earth gathers itself together, becomes a
criminal or a revolutionary society, finds some visionary
or some cosmopolitan agitator to lead it, establishes its
own code of ethics, imposes the desperate discipline of
outlaws upon its members, and prepares to rend the free
society that allowed it to exist. It is astonishing with
what docility masses of Englishmen, supposed to be jealous
of their personal liberty, will obey such a revolutionary
junta, that taxes and commands them, and decrees when
they shall starve and when they shall fight. I suspect
that the working-people of the towns no longer have
what was called the British character. Their forced
unanimity in action and passion is like that of the ages
of faith ; its inspiration, like that of early Christianity,
comes from a few apostles, perhaps foreign Jews, men
who in the beginning had visions of some millennium ;
and the cohesion of the faithful is maintained afterwards
by preaching, by custom, by persecution, and by murder.
Yet it is intelligible that the most earnest liberals, who
in so far as they were advocates of liberty fostered these
conspiracies, in so far as they are philanthropists should
applaud them, and feel the need of this new tyranny.
They save liberal principles by saying that they applaud
it only provisionally as a necessary means of freeing the
people. But of freeing the people from what ? From the
consequences of freedom.

IQO LATER SOLILOQUIES

44
JOHN BULL AND HIS PHILOSOPHERS

ENGLAND has been curiously served by her philosophers.
Personally and in their first intention they have usually
been sturdy Britons ; but their scope has seldom been
equal to their sagacity in particular matters, they have
not divined the ultimate drift of their ideas, and they
have often ended by adopting, a little blankly and doggedly,
some foreign or fantastic system, apparently most in
expressive of John Bull. Nevertheless the exotic tendency
in so many British philosophers, as in so many disaffected
British poets, is itself a mark of the British character.
The crust of convention has solidified too soon, and the
suppressed fires issue in little erratic streams that seem of
an alien substance. In speculation as in other things the
Englishman trusts his inner man ; his impulse is to
soliloquize even in science. At the same time his inner
man dislikes to be too articulate ; he is soon at a stand
in direct self - expression ; and as a poet may take to
describing nature or Italian passions, so a philosopher
may pick up some alien doctrine that comes to hand, and
that seems friendly to his mind ; not understanding it
very well, perhaps, in its native quality, but making it a
living companion in his own lucubrations, and a symbol
for what remains hidden but revered in his breast. In
this way the Bible or Plato may serve him to found sects
upon exclusively expressing his own feelings ; or remaining
a plain Englishman to all practical purposes, he may
become, for his greater private satisfaction, a revolutionary
atheist, a spiritualist, a Catholic, or a Buddhist. In such
strange allegiances something may be due to wayward
learning, or to genuine plasticity of mind and power to
feel as very different souls have felt in other climes ; but
a part is unmistakable helplessness and dire need, and a
part, perhaps, affectation.

When his own resources fail, however, the most obvious
easement and support for the English inner man are the
classical and Anglican traditions he has been bred in,
when these are not too nicely defined nor too slavishly

JOHN BULL AND HIS PHILOSOPHERS 191

followed. Most characteristic is John Bull the theologian,
instinct with heresy and practising compromise ; but the
rationalistic John Bull is very like him in his alternative
way of securing the same supreme object of thinking what
he likes to think. In both cases he embraces his opinions
much more because they are wholesome and important
than because they are certain or clear. Opinions, he feels,
should be summary and safe ; they should express the
lessons of experience.

As he conceives it at first, experience does not merely
exist, it teaches. In a sporadic fashion it yields sound
satisfactions, clear warnings, plain facts. It admonishes
him to trust his senses, the reports of reputable travellers
and naturalists, Christianity, and the British constitution,
all when duly revised ; and on the other hand to shun
popery, scholastic quibbles, absolutism, and revolution.
But evidently experience could never teach him these
things if his inner man did not contribute its decided
cravings and aversions. His inner man detests dictation
and loves opportunity ; in ideas it prefers timeliness to
finality. Therefore, when his philosophers come upon
the scene they cannot appeal to him by coercive proofs,
nor by the impressive architecture of their systems, nor
by disentangling and setting clearly before him any
ultimate ideal. To win his ear they must rather drive
his current convictions home, nearer to their source in
himself ; they must invite him to concentrate his empiri
cism. For instance, he trusts his senses ; and the
philosophers can deeply interest him if they ask him
what, precisely, his senses vouch for. Is it external
things ? But can he actually see anything except colours,
or touch anything except resistances ? Can he feel any
thing except his own sensations ? By appealing to his
honesty, the sophists catch him in a trap, and he changes
his mind in trying to utter it. It will appear presently,
as he pursues his inquiry, that he has no knowledge of
those external things and events which he had been so
sure of ; they were mere empty notions, and his genuine
experience contained nothing but the pulses of his inner
life, changes in his ideas and vital temperature, which an
accurate autobiography might record. And the more

192 LATER SOLILOQUIES

scrupulously he considers these pulses of his inner life the
less and less will he find in them. He and his whole
experience will soon be reduced to a series of sensations
in single file, with nothing behind them. In reality even
this is too much. Although the inertia of psychological
conventions and the romantic habit of self-consciousness
have kept him from perceiving it, even to this day, yet the
fact that a sensation is occurring is not revealed by that
sensation itself ; no date, place, or relation to a mind is
included in its deliverance, and no relation to anything
before or beyond ; so that the bare datum of sensation
is an aesthetic being, not a mental one ; an ideal term, not
an event ; a universal essence, not a particular fact ; and
immersion in sense or in absolute immediate experience,
when animal faith and intelligence are taken away from
it, would remove from us every vestige of the notion that
anything exists or that anything happens. But without
pushing analysis so far, the empirical philosophers left
John Bull, when he listened to them, singularly bereft
of those comfortable impedimenta with which he had
expected to travel through life — without a body, without
an environment, without a ground, or any natural perfec
tion or destiny, for his moral being. He had loved
exploration, and had looked forward with the flush of
confidence to the knowledge and power which his dis
coveries would bring him ; but now he saw that all dis
coveries were incalculable, arbitrary, and provisional, since
they were not truly discoveries, but only developments.

Here was an odd transformation. The self-educated
merchants and indignant reformers who, thumping their
desks dogmatically, had appealed so roundly to the
evidence of their senses, little expected that their philosophy
was directed to turning them in the end into inarticulate
sensualists, rapt in omphalic contemplation of their states
of mind. Some academic idealists, disliking this result,
which cast a slur on the pre-eminence of spirituality and
learning, and yet not being willing or able to give up the
method by which that result had been reached, sought to
push the inquiry further, and to come out of the wood
on quite the other side. My sensations, they said, since I
can now survey the whole series they form, must all exist

JOHN BULL AND HIS PHILOSOPHERS 193

together in my present apprehension ; and as I cannot
know them except in this single and present glance, they
never can have existed out of it ; so that I am not really
a series of sensations, but only the idea that I am a series
of sensations ; in other words, I have become a single
sensation instead of many. To make this clearer the same
philosophers added that this single sensation or thought,
which is what I really am, is also God. Experience now
turned out not to be anything that goes on or happens
or is endured ; it is the theme of an immutable divine
contemplation and divine satisfaction. I am God in so
far as I think and approve ; but the chequered experience
which I supposed myself to be undergoing is merely imputed
to myself by God and me in our thinking.

This second conclusion, like the first, has its value for
some temperaments. It brings suddenly before us, as if
it were an accomplished fact, the innate ideal of the
intellect : to see the changing aspects of all things from
above, in their true eternal relations. But this ideal, too,
is utterly disparate from that practical experience and
prevision which John Bull prizes so highly and thinks he
possesses ; indeed, the sublimity of this view lies precisely
in its tendency to freeze and submerge all experience,
transmuting hard facts and anxious events into painted
ships upon a painted ocean, and for our stumbling and
unfinished progress substituting a bound volume of travels.

What false step could bring British philosophy, in its
gropings, to conclusions so un-English that even those
who feel compelled to propose them do so shamefacedly,
with many euphemisms and convenient confusions, or
even fail altogether to understand the tremendous paradoxes
they are repeating ? It was a false step at which Hobbes
halted, which Locke took unsuspectingly, and which sent
Berkeley and Hume head over heels : the assumption that
facts are known immediately. In reality none of the
facts which the sturdy Briton feels that he knows — and
they are the true facts of nature and of moral life — would
be known to him if he were without tentative intelligence
and instinctive animal faith ; indeed, without these the
senses would have no virtue and would inform us of
nothing ; and cows would not see grass nor horses hay,

o

194 LATER SOLILOQUIES

but only green or yellow patches, like rapt empirical
philosophers. When Hobbes said that no discourse what
soever can end in absolute knowledge of fact, he uttered
a great truth, but he implied a great error, since he implied
that sense — meaning the senseless sensations of idiots —
could give such knowledge ; whereas the absolute datum
in sense is just as ideal, and just as little a fact, as the
deliverance of the most theoretical discourse ; and absolute
knowledge — if we call such apprehension knowledge — can
seize only some aesthetic or logical term, without any
given date, place, or connection in experience. Empiricism
in the end must substitute these ideal essences, on the
ground that they are the only data, for the facts of nature
— facts which animal reactions and the beliefs expressing
them are requisite to discover, and which science defines
by the cumulative use of reason. In making this substitu
tion empiricism passes against its will into sensualism or
idealism. Then John Bull and his philosophers part
company : he sticks manfully to his confused conventional
opinions, which after all give him a very tolerable know
ledge of the facts ; while they go digging for an absolute
knowledge of fact, which is impossible, in an intuitive
cloudland where there are only aesthetic essences. Hence
the bankruptcy of their enterprise. Immediate data are
the counters of experience, but they are the money of
empiricism.

45
OCCAM'S RAZOR

To many an Englishman the human head seems too
luxuriant. With its quantities of superfluous words and
ideas, it grows periodically hot and messy, and needs a
thorough cropping and scrubbing. To this end, William
of Occam long ago invented his razor : entia non multi-
plicanda praeter necessitate™ ; a maxim calculated to
shave the British inner man clean, and make a roundhead
of him, not to say a blockhead. That everything is
" nothing but " something else, probably inferior to it,
became in time a sort of refrain in his politics and

OCCAM'S RAZOR 195

philosophy. He saw that reflection was constantly em
broidering on the facts ; but did he suppose that the
pattern of things was really simpler than that of ideas,
or did he feel that, however elaborate things might be,
thought at least might be simple ? At any rate, he aimed
instinctively at economy of terms, retrenchment in belief,
reduction of theory to the irreducible minimum. If
theory was not useful, what was the use of it ? And
certainly all that can be said for some theories is that
perhaps they are useful ; and when ideas are merely
useful, being worthless in themselves and absorbing human
caloric, the less we require of them the better. Thought
might then be merely a means to a life without thought,
and belief a door to a heaven where no beliefs were
expected ; all speech might be like the curt words one
says to the waiter, in the hope of presently dining in
silence ; and all looking might be looking out, as in crossing
a crowded street, ending in the blessed peace of not having
to look any more.

Occam's razor has gradually shorn British and German
philosophy of the notions of substance and cause, matter
and God, truth and the soul. Sometimes these terms
were declared to stand for nothing whatever, because
(as in the case of matter and substance) if I reduced myself
to a state of artificial stupidity I might for a moment
stop short of the conception of them. More often (as in
the case of the soul) the term was declared to stand for
something real, which, however, was " nothing but "
something else. Of course, all words and thoughts stand
for something else ; and the question is only whether we
can find another word or thought that will express the
reality better. Thus, if I said that the soul was " nothing
but " a series of sensations, I should soon have to add
that this series, to make up a soul, must arise in the same
animal body, and must be capable of being eventually
surveyed and recalled together ; while I should have to
assign to some other obscure agency those unconscious
vital functions which were formerly attributed to the soul
in forming and governing the body, and breeding the
passions ; functions without which my series of sensations
would hardly be what it is. I am not confident that all

ig6 LATER SOLILOQUIES

this laboured psychology makes things much clearer in
the end, or does not multiply entities without necessity ;
since where I had simply spoken of the soul, I should now
have to speak of sensations, series, possibility, synthesis,
personal identity, the transcendental unity of apperception,
and the unconscious mind. Something is doubtless gained
by coining these modern and questionable expressions,
since they indicate true complexities in the facts, while a
poetic term like " soul " covers them only by pointing
the finger of childish wonder at them, without analysis.
Nature is far more complicated than any language or
philosophy, and the more these refine, the closer they
can fit. The anxiety of the honest Occam to stick to the
facts, and pare his thoughts to the quick, had this justifica
tion in it, that sometimes our images and distinctions are
misplaced. Grammar, usurping the role of physics, created
metaphysics, the trouble with which is not at all that it
multiplies entities, since no metaphysician can invent
anything that did not lie from all eternity in the realm
of essence, like the plot of unwritten novels, waiting for
some one with wit enough to think of it. The trouble is
rather that the metaphysician probably gives his favourite
essences the wrong status. These beings may well be
absent from the time and place to which he hastily assigns
them ; they may even be incongruous altogether with
what happens to exist anywhere. What happens to exist
is perhaps what he thinks he is describing, or what, like
Occam, he would like to describe if he could ; but he is
probably not able. Yet that doesn't matter so much as
he imagines. What happens to exist can take very good
care of itself, and is quite indifferent to what people
think of it ; and as for us, if we possess such cursory
knowledge of the nearer parts of existence as is sufficient
for our safety, there is no reason why we should attend to
it too minutely : there's metal more attractive in discourse
and in fiction. Mind, as Hobbes said, is fancy, and it is
the things of fancy that greet us first and reward us best.
They are far from being more absurd than the facts. In
themselves, all things are equally unnecessary and equally
possible ; for their own part, all are equally ready to be
thought of or even to be born. It is only the routine of

OCCAM'S RAZOR 197

nature or the sluggish human imagination that refuses to
admit most of them, as country people refuse to admit that
foreign languages or manners might do as well as their own.
If God or nature had used Occam's razor and had
hesitated to multiply beings without necessity, where should
we be ? Far from practising economy, nature is pre
vented from overflowing into every sort of flourish and
excrescence only by the local paucity of matter, or the
pre-emption of it by other forms ; because forms, once
embodied in matter, acquire all its inertia, and grow
dreadfully stubborn and egotistical. Scrimpy philosophers
little know whose stewards they are when they complain
of lavishness in nature, or her lordly way of living ; her
substance cannot be spent, nor its transformations ex
hausted. In sheer play, and without being able to help
it, she will suddenly create organization, or memory, or
intelligence, or any of those little vortices called passions,
persons, or nations, which sustain themselves for a moment,
hypostatizing their frail unity into some moral being —
an interest or a soul. And as we are superfluous in the
midst of nature, so is the best part of ourselves superfluous
in us. Poetry, music and pictures, inspired and shaded
by human emotion, are surely better worth having than
the inarticulate experience they spring from. Even in
our apprehension of the material world, the best part is
the adaptation of it to our position and faculties, since
this is what introduces boundaries, perspectives, comparison
and beauty. It is only what exists materially that exists
without excuse, whereas what the mind creates has some
vital justification, and may serve to justify the rest. Hence
the utility of Occam's razor itself, which may help us to
arrive at a strict and spare account of what the world
would be without us : a somewhat ironical speculation which
is the subtlest product and last luxury of the scientific
mind. Meantime the sensuous and rhetorical trappings of
human knowledge, from which exact science abstracts, by
no means disappear ; they remain to enrich the sphere of
language and fancy, to which judicious people always felt
that they belonged ; and this intellectual or literary realm is
no less actual and interesting than any other, being a part
of the moral radiation and exuberance of a living world.

198 LATER SOLILOQUIES

46
EMPIRICISM

EXPERIENCE is a fine word, but what does it mean ? It
seems to carry with it a mixed sense of mastery and dis
appointment, suggesting knowledge of a sort with despair
of better knowledge. Is it such contact with events as
nobody can avoid, shocks and pressure endured from
circumstances and from the routine of the world ? But a
cricket-ball has no experience, although it comes in contact
with many hands, receives hard knocks, and plays its part
in the vicissitudes of a protracted game. There are men
in much the same case ; they travel, they undergo an illness
or a conversion, and after a little everything in them is
exactly as it was before ; -n-dOos with them is not /xa#os ;
their natures are so faithful to the a priori and so elastic
that they rebound from the evidence of sense and the
buffets of fortune like a rubber bag full of wind ; they pass
through life with round eyes open, and a perpetual instinct
ive babble, and yet in the moral sense of the word they
have no experience, not being mindful enough to acquire
any. It would seem that to gather anything we must
first pause, and that before we can have experience we
must have minds.

Yet if we said that experience arose by the operation
of mind, would not all the operations of mind be equally
experience ? Has not a maniac probably more and more
vivid experience than a man of the world ? Doubtless
when people call their fancies or thoughts experience,
they mean to imply that they have an external source,
as " religious experience " is assumed to manifest divine
intervention, and " psychical experience " to prove the
self-existence of departed spirits. But these assumptions
are not empirical ; and evidently the religious or psychical
experience itself, whatever its cause, is the only empirical
fact in the case. Those who appeal to the lessons of
experience are not empiricists, for these are lessons that
only reason can learn. Experience, as practical people
understand it, is not every sort of consciousness or memory,
but only such as is addressed to the facts of nature and

EMPIRICISM 199

controlled by the influence of those facts ; material contact
or derivation is essential to it. Experience is both physical
and mental, the intellectual fruit of a material intercourse.
It presupposes animal bodies in contact with things, and
it presupposes intelligent minds in those bodies, keeping
count of the shocks received, understanding their causes,
and expecting their recurrence as it will actually take
place. To these naturalistic convictions all those ought to
have clung who valued experience as a witness rather
than as a sensation ; without animals in a natural environ
ment experience, as contrasted with fancy or intuition,
can neither be nor be conceived. It means so much of
knowledge and readiness as is fetched from contact with
events by a teachable and intelligent creature ; it is a fund
of wisdom gathered by living in familiar intercourse with
things.

But such assumptions are an offence to the expert
empiricist. The moment he comes upon the scene we
feel that all we thought experience had taught us is going
to be disproved. " Do you admit," he begins by asking,
" that nothing can be more real than experience ? " We
do admit it. " And can you ever know anything that is
not experience ? " Perhaps not ; and yet would experience
be very distinct or very significant if it was experience of
nothing ? "Of nothing, indeed," he retorts, withering us
with a scornful glance and the consciousness of his masked
batteries ; " as if experience itself was nothing ! Experience
is everything ; and when you have experience of experience
what more could you ask for, even if you were Doctor
Faustus in person ? What spurious little non-empirical
particle is this of of yours ? And what illegitimate ghost
is this something else that experience should be ofl Can
you, without confessing to an adulterous intercourse with
what is not experience, explain these natural but dis
reputable members of your intellectual family ? " We
cannot explain them, and we blush. Yet why should
experience arise at all if there is no occasion for it ?
" Occasion ! " cries the empiricist ; " another illegal figment,
the old notion of cause ! Is it not notorious that causation
is nothing but the habit which some parts of experience
have of following upon others ? How then should the

200 LATER SOLILOQUIES

whole of it follow upon any part ? Experience cannot
spring from anything, it cannot express anything, and it
cannot know anything, because experience is all there is."

Here is a considerable retrenchment in the scope of
our philosophy : no material world, no soul, and (in the
proper sense of the words) no God and no knowledge.
Retrenchment, however, is often a sign of wisdom, and
the retrenching empiricist deserves to be followed, like
the retrenching hermit, into his psychological wilderness,
not with a vow never to return to the world, for that
would be precipitate, but in the hope of sounding, in one
direction, the depths of spiritual discipline and disillusion.
And the empirical eremite can taste rare pleasures. All
things, for him, become the appanage of the inner man ;
and we need not wonder that the pensive Englishman is
ready to be empirical in this sense and to become an
idealist. The lessons of experience, if he was forced to
take them seriously, might tend to dethrone his inner man
and lead him to materialism ; but fortunately the lessons
of experience, for an empiricist, can be nothing but little
epicycles within it, or cross-references to its literal text ;
they cannot spoil its intimate and romantic nature, which
is to be no end of pulsations and no end of pictures. How
dead would anything external or permanent be, even if
we thought we could find it ! How abstract would be
anything common to all times and places, how terrible a
mocking truth that should overarch them for ever 1

It is true that the romantic empiricist is not very
radical ; he commonly stops short of any doubts on the
validity of memory, with all the yarns it spins ; his past
adventures and his growth are too fascinating for him to
doubt their reality. Sometimes he even trusts a super
stitious prophecy, under the name of logical evolution,
foretelling what his destiny is somehow compelled to be.
At other times he prefers to leave the future ambiguous,
so that the next step may lead him anywhere, perhaps to
heaven, provided it is understood that his career, even
there, is always to remain an unfinished voyage in an
uncharted sea. In strictness, however, he has no right to
this fond interest in himself. If he became a perfect
empiricist he would trust experience only if it taught him

EMPIRICISM 201

absolutely nothing, even about his own past. This is hard
for the flesh, and it may not be fair to ask an empiricist
to be heroic in the interests of logic ; but if he could screw
his courage up for the plunge, his spirit might find itself
perfectly at home in the new situation. What he might
have been or might have thought, he would dismiss as a
dead issue ; he would watch only his present life as it
flowed, and he would love exclusively what he was becom
ing. There is a sense of safety in being and not thinking
which probably all the animals know, and there is a mystical
happiness in accepting existence without understanding
it. ; but the sense of safety does not render the animals really
safe, and the price they pay for living in the moment is
that they carry nothing over from one moment to another
except bare existence itself. The disadvantage of radical
empiricism is that it shuts out experience.

47
THE BRITISH HEGELIANS

IT was formerly a matter of some surprise to me that
there should be so many Hegelians in England, and in
such places of influence. I could imagine how the system
might have taken root in circles where the classic tradition
was absent or enfeebled — in America, in Scotland, among
the Dissenters or Jews in England itself ; but how could
Oxford and Cambridge fail to see in that system the trail
of the serpent ? How could they mistake it for a Christian
or for a spiritual philosophy ? It is indeed, in form, an
encyclopaedic system, and in that sense suitable to
universities ; and it deifies knowledge such as an encyclo
paedia can give, turning it into the sum total of reality,
so that it flatters the self-sufficiency of pedants, or that
of any reflective mind. But in Oxford and Cambridge
knowledge is not everything ; they are more and less
than universities ; the learning they cultivate is selective
and pursued in the service of aristocratic liberty. I
should not expect them to care much for a philosophy
that was not poetic and devout. I sometimes fancy

202 LATER SOLILOQUIES

how the genuine Oxonians must have smiled to hear T. H.
Green, in the early days of transcendentalism, talking about
his spiritual principle in nature. By spiritual he meant
mind-made ; he thought the world, remaining just as it
is, could suddenly be proved to be spiritual if you could
show that a mental synthesis was requisite to hold it
together. But what possible advantage is it to the world
to be held together by a mental synthesis, rather than by
space or time or the truth of its constitution ? A synthesis
of worthless facts does not render them severally better,
nor itself a good. A spirit whose essential function was
to create relations would be merely a generative principle,
as the spider is to its web ; it would be no better than its
work, unless perhaps it was spiritual enough to grow

r weary of that vain labour. Spiritual, for those who retain
the language of Christendom, signifies free from the world

! and from the flesh, and addressed to the eternal and to the
beautiful.

Everything, however, has its explanation, and in the
matter of English Hegelism I think I begin to see it. In
the first place, I was rashly identifying England with a
figment of my dreams, with which I was in love : I saw
in my mind's eye a manly and single-minded England,
free, candid, poetical, akin to feudal France, beauty-
loving like old Italy, the Benjamin of the Roman family
of nations, adding to the dignity and disinterestedness of
the Castilian character only a certain blond charm, a
certain infusion of northern purity, and of sympathy
with the wild and rural voices of nature. In this England,
in which there was something Spartan and archaically
Greek, the men were like Hippolytus and the women
like Antigone. Naturally it was unintelligible to me that
the system of Hegel should take root in such a nation.
Persons with a ripe moral tradition are not attracted by
sophistry. No argument, however specious, will convince
them that the experience of man on earth makes up the
whole universe, or the chief part of it ; much less will
they allow fortune, under the pompous name of evolution,
to dictate to them their moral allegiance. The chief force
of the Hegelian system for those who are not metaphysicians
lies in the criterion of progress which it imposes. This

THE BRITISH HEGELIANS 203

criterion is not beauty in art, nor truth in philosophy,
nor justice in society, nor happiness in the individual
life : the criterion is simply the direction which the actual
movement happens to be taking. Hegel endeavours to
show in what way forms are inevitably passing into one
another. Thus his ethics begs defence of history, and his
history calls for aid on metaphysics. And what meta
physics ? A logic of moral fashions. Now it seemed to
me axiomatic that eager co-operation with whatever is
going on, or is bound to win, would be repulsive to a man
of honour. Nor could I conceive a true Englishman
taking kindly even to the grand side of this system, which
to me personally is rather attractive, I mean to its satirical
elevation. The English mind is tender and temperate:
it deprecates scorn. But Hegel, in his scathing moods, is
comparable to Heraclitus ; he mocks every opinion with
an opinion which refutes it, and every life with another
life which kills it. He has the wisdom of the serpent ;
but unlike Heraclitus, whose fabled tears were warm, he
has the heart of the serpent too. He despises finitude
because it is weak, as if an infinity of pervasive weakness
were strong, or a perpetual flux a victory for anything.
Laughing, I can't help thinking, up his sleeve, he suggests
that this flux itself is a victory for the spirit, meaning
by spirit the law by which he supposes that this flux is
controlled. But this is sheer mockery : the only moral
victory is that achieved, under favourable conditions,
by some living spirit, glad to be expressed or to have been
expressed in some perfect form. The finite only is good :
the infinite tides are worth exactly what they cast up.
There is a bitter idolatry of fate in this system which
might seem splendid to a barbarian ; but how, I asked
myself, can it be anything but horrible to a cultivated
conscience, or to a pupil of the Greeks ?

In the real England the character I dreamt of exists,
but very much mixed, and overbalanced by its contrary.
Many have the minds of true gentlemen, poetically
detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal things only
their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English character
had been general, England could never have become
Puritan, nor bred so many prosperous merchants and

204 LATER SOLILOQUIES

manufacturers, nor sent such shoals of emigrants to the
colonies ; it would hardly have revelled as it does in political
debates and elections, and in societies for the prevention
and promotion of everything. In the real England there
is a strong if not dominant admixture of worldliness.
How ponderous these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels,
these bishops, these politicians, these solemn snobs !
How tight -shut, how moralistic, how overbearing these
intellectuals with a mission ! All these important people
are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the
world, and yet without the least idea of what they would
change it into in the end, or to what purpose. Being so
much in earnest, they are convinced that they must be
living on the highest principles : what, then, is more
intelligible than that they should welcome a philosophy
which assures them that such is the case ? They are well
pleased to hear, on the highest metaphysical authority,
that the first duty of a rich man is to grow richer, and of
a settled man to redouble in loyalty to his wife, his
community, his party, and his business. The Protestant
reformers told them so formerly in biblical language ; the
Protestant philosophers tell them so now in the language
of Hegel.

Besides, on its technical side, the Hegelian system has
a great strength, and was most apposite in the predicament
in which, fifty years ago, philosophy found itself in
England. It supplied three illusions which idealism sadly
needed if it was to become orthodox and popular : the
illusions of profundity, of comprehensiveness, and of
finality. It was a philosophy of progress — another claim
to popularity in the nineteenth century — not only progress
in the world at large, but especially in philosophy itself ;
and a philosophy of progress cannot ask us to go back,
to cry peccavi, and reconsider the false assumptions on
which we may have been reasoning for two hundred or
for two thousand years. It must accept these assumptions
and go on building upon them, always a higher and a
higher structure. Now the principal assumption of British
philosophy, on which German philosophy itself rests, was
that nothing can be experienced except experience itself,
and nothing known except knowledge. But the Germans

THE BRITISH HEGELIANS 205

analysed far more accurately than the British had formerly
done what the notions of experience and knowledge contain.
They demonstrated the unity of glance that is essential
to it, and thus refuted (without of course removing) the
successive and episodic character of experience, as the
honest but unwary empiricists had conceived it. Hume
and Mill had remained naturalists in regard to the distribu
tion of those volatile ideas to which they pretended to
reduce the world. John Stuart Mill had a deeper and a
sweeter mind than his critics ; there was something in
him akin to Wordsworth or to Matthew Arnold ; but his
inherited principles were treacherous, and opened the door
to just such a concentration of egotism as the Hegelians
brought about. Moreover, Hume and Mill had seemed
depressing ; they perplexed without filling the mind ;
they made everything that is most familiar and interesting
seem strangely hypothetical ; whereas in Hegel the pageant
of nature and history appeared to be re-formed and to march
round and round the stage of the ego under the strongest
light to the loudest music. There was a sort of deafening
optimism about it ; and not only was a convenient school-
book universe offered you, warranted complete, but all
previous philosophies were succinctly described, refuted,
and linked together, in a manner most convenient for
tutorial purposes. Of course, the true character and eternal
plausibility of each great system were falsified in such a
survey ; each was attached artificially to what happened
to precede and to follow it in time, or in the knowledge of
the historian ; as if history were a single chain of events,
and its march dialectical — a fiction which Hegel did
not blush to maintain. An inner instability was thus
attributed to each view which came only from the slippery
mind of the critic touring amongst them, without the least
intention of finding anywhere a home in which to rest.
Hegel was not looking for the truth — why dream of truth
when you possess learning ? — he was writing an apology
for opinion. He enjoyed understanding and imagining
things plausibly, and had a great intelligence to pour
into his constructions ; but this very heat of thought fused
everything into the mould of his method, and he gave out
that he had understood every system much better than

206 LATER SOLILOQUIES

those who believed in it, and had been carried by its inner
contradictions (which its adepts never saw) to the next
convenient position in the development of human fancy,
and of his own lectures.

Abstraction, such as withdrawal of the mind from
worldly affairs, is condemned by this philosophy : you
must glut the brain and heart with everything that exists.
An even worse abstraction, for a philosopher, is to detach
the object from the subject, and believe it to exist inde
pendently. But what is abstraction ? Can attention ever
render things more discrete than they are in their own
nature ? Suppose I abstract a coin from another man's
pocket : it is easily proved by Hegel's logic that such an
abstraction is a mere appearance. Coins cannot exist
as coins except as pocketed and owned ; at the same
time they imply an essential tendency to pass into the
pockets of other men : for a coin that could not issue
from the pocket would be a coin in name only, and not in
function. When it actually passes from one man's pocket
into another's, this circumstance, far from justifying us
in thinking the coin a separable thing, shows that all
men's pockets (when not empty and therefore, in function,
not pockets at all) are intrinsically related and, in a higher
sense, one and the same purse. Therefore, we may con
clude, it was not the sly transference of the coin from
my neighbour's pocket into mine that was the wrongful
abstraction, but only the false supposition that if the coin
was his it was not, by right of eminent domain, mine
also. A man, in so far as he is the possessor of coins, is
simply a pocket, and all pockets, in so far as there is
transferable coin in them, are one pocket together. In
this way we avoid false abstraction by proving that every
thing is abstract.

Nor is this all ; for strange as it may seem, Hegel appeals
also to one type of religious people, and seems to them to
lift religious faith triumphantly above all possible assaults
of fact or of science. Are not all facts mere ideas ? And
must not all ideas be bred in the mind according to
its own free principles of life and effort ? Is not all this
semblance of externality in things a blessed foil to spiritual
activity ? Does not this universal mutation pay loud

THE BRITISH HEGELIANS 207

homage to eternal law ? Things go by threes : that is
the reason why they exist and why they move, and the
sovereign good to be attained by their motion. If every
truth turns out to be a lie, every lie is a part of some higher
truth ; if everything becomes unreal, because it passes
into something else, this other thing inherits its reality ;
and if we look at things as a whole instead of seriatim, and
spread out our moving film into a panorama, we perceive
that everything has implied everything else from the
beginning, and formed a part of it ; so that only from the
point of view of ignorance is anything earlier, or better,
or truer than anything else. Here, in the All, we have
rest from our labours.

In this way even the slaves of the world at last learn
to overcome the world ; but it is too late. This All, even
if it were open to human survey, would have no value : it
defeats each of its constituent lives and is itself responsive
to no living desire. The indistinction which the vague
idea of it produces in the mind may be soothing to the
weary ; but better than mystical relief at the end would
have been moral freedom in the beginning. That a different
life will supersede mine is nothing against my happiness ;
that time is swallowing me up is nothing against my
appropriate eternity. How vain the crabbed hand of the
miser stringing his pearls and never looking at them,
counting the drops that trickle into his cup and never
emptying it, never feeling the intoxication of living now,
of telling the truth frankly, and of being happy here ! If
the devil laughs at me because I am mortal, I laugh at
him for imagining that death can trouble me, or any other
free spirit, so long as I live, or after I am dead.

48
THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY

THIS war will kill the belief in progress, and it wras high
time. Progress is often a fact : granted a definite end to
be achieved, we may sometimes observe a continuous
approach towards achieving it, as for instance towards

208 LATER SOLILOQUIES

cutting off a leg neatly when it has been smashed ; and
such progress is to be desired in all human arts. But belief
in progress, like belief in fate or in the number three, is
a sheer superstition, a mad notion that because some idea
— here the idea of continuous change for the better — has
been realized somewhere, that idea was a power which
realized itself there fatally, and which must be secretly
realizing itself everywhere else, even where the facts con
tradict it. Nor is belief in progress identical with belief
in Providence, or even compatible with it. Providence
would not have begun wrong in order to correct itself ;
and in works which are essentially progressive, like a story,
the beginning is not worse than the end, if the artist is
competent.

What true progress is, and how it is usually qualified
by all sorts of backsliding and by incompatible movements
in contrary directions, is well illustrated by the history of
philosophy. There has been progress in it ; if we start
with the first birth of intelligence and assume that the end
pursued is to understand the world, the progress has been
immense. We do not understand the world yet ; but we
have formed many hypotheses about it corroborated by
experience, we are in possession of many arts which involve
true knowledge, and we have collated and criticized —
especially during the last century — a great number of
speculations which, though unverified or unverifiable, reveal
the problems and the possibilities in the case ; so that I
think a philosopher in our day has no excuse for being so
utterly deceived in various important matters as the best
philosophers formerly were through no fault of theirs,
because they were misled by a local tradition, and in
evitably cut off from the traditions of other ages and
races. Nevertheless the progress of philosophy has not
been of such a sort that the latest philosophers are the
best : it is quite the other way. Philosophy in this respect
is like poetry. There is progress in that new poets arise
with new gifts, and the fund of transmitted poetry is en
riched ; but Homer, the first poet amongst the Greeks, was
also the best, and so Dante in Italy, and Shakespeare in
England. When a civilization and a language take shape
they have a wonderful vitality, and their first-fruits are

THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY 209

some love-child, some incomparable creature in whom the
whole genius of the young race bursts forth uncontaminated
and untrammelled. What follows is more valuable in this
respect or in that ; it renders fitly the partial feelings and
varying fashions of a long decadence ; but nothing, so long
as that language and that tradition last, can ever equal
their first exuberance. Philosophy is not so tightly bound
as poetry is to language and to local inspiration, but it
has largely shared the same vicissitudes ; and in each
school of philosophy only the inventors and founders are
of any consequence ; the rest are hacks. Moreover, if we
take each school as a whole, and compare it with the
others, I think we may repeat the same observation : the
first are the best. Those following have made very real
improvements ; they have discovered truths and methods
before unknown ; but instead of adding these (as they
might have done) to the essential wisdom of their pre
decessors, they have proceeded like poets, each a new-born
child in a magic world, abandoned to his fancy and his
personal experience. Bent on some specific reform or
wrapped up in some favourite notion, they have denied
the obvious because other people had pointed it out ; and
the later we come down in the history of philosophy the
less important philosophy becomes, and the less true in
fundamental matters.

Suppose I arrange the works of the essential philosophers
— leaving out secondary and transitional systems — in a
bookcase of four shelves ; on the top shelf (out of reach,
since I can't read the language) I will place the Indians ;
on the next the Greek naturalists ; and to remedy the
unfortunate paucity of their remains, I will add here those
free inquirers of the renaissance, leading to Spinoza, who
after two thousand years picked up the thread of scientific
speculation ; and besides, all modern science : so that this
shelf will run over into a whole library of what is not
ordinarily called philosophy. On the third shelf I will put
Platonism, including Aristotle, the Fathers, the Scholastics,
and all honestly Christian theology ; and on the last,
modern or subjective philosophy in its entirety. I will
leave lying on the table, as of doubtful destination, the
works of my contemporaries. There is much life in some

2io LATER SOLILOQUIES

of them. I like their water-colour sketches of self -con
sciousness, their rebellious egotisms, their fervid reforms of
phraseology, their peep-holes through which some very
small part of things may be seen very clearly : they have
lively wits, but they seem to me like children playing
blind-man's-buff ; they are keenly excited at not knowing
where they are. They are really here, in the common
natural world, where there is nothing in particular to
threaten or to allure them ; and they have only to remove
their philosophical bandages in order to perceive it.

What sort of a world this is — I will not say in itself, but
in respect to us — can be perceived almost at once by any
candid spirit, and the Indians readily perceived it. They
saw that substance is infinite, out of scale with our sensuous
images and (except in the little vortex that makes us up)
out of sympathy with our endeavours ; and that spirit in
us nevertheless can hold its own, because salvation lies in
finding joy in the truth, not in rendering fortune propitious,
by some miracle, to our animal interests. The spirit is at
home in the infinite, and morally independent of all the
accidents of existence : nothing that nature can produce
outruns its potential scope, its desire to know the truth ;
and its disinterestedness renders it free, free especially from
any concern about its own existence. It does not deem it
the part of piety to deny the fugitive, impotent, and fantastic
nature of human life. It knows that the thoughts of man
and his works, however great or delightful when measured
by the human scale, are but the faintest shimmer on the
surface of being. On the ruin of humanistic illusions (such
as make up the religious philosophy of the West) it knows
how to establish a tender morality and a sublime religion.

Indian wisdom, intent on the infinity and unity of sub
stance and on the vanity of human life, neglected two
inquiries which are nevertheless of the greatest interest to
the spirit, so long as this vain life endures. The Indians
did not study the movement and mechanism of nature :
they had no science. Their poets, in a sort of spectacular
physics, were content to paint vividly the images of sense,
conscious of their fugitive charm, and of their monstrous
and delirious diversity. They also neglected the art of
rational conduct in this world ; the refinements of their

THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY 211

moral discipline were all mystical ; they were determined
by watching the movement of inner experience, and allowing
the fancy to distinguish its objects and its stages. They
thought the spirit could liberate itself by thinking, as by
thinking it seemed to have entangled itself in this mesh of
dreams. But how could the spirit, if it had been free
originally, ever have attached its fortunes to any lump of
clay ? Why should it be the sport of time and change and
the vicissitudes of affairs ? From the point of view of
the spirit (which is that of the Indians) this question is
absolutely insoluble ; a fact which drives them to say that
this entanglement is not " real," but only an illusion of
being entangled. Certainly substance is not entangled, but
persists and moves according to its nature ; and if what
exists besides substance — its aspects and the spirit in us
that notes them — is not " real " because not substantial,
then the unreal has the privilege, as Democritus pointed out,'
of existing as well as the real, and more obviously. But
this subterfuge, of denying that appearance exists, because
its existence is only the seeming of its objects, was inevitable
in the Indian system, and dramatically right. The spirit,
left to its own fond logic, remains perfectly ignorant of its
natural ancestry and cannot imagine why it finds itself
caught in the vice of existence, and hanging like Prometheus
on a crag of Caucasus, or like Christ on the cross. The
myth of reincarnation, whilst it meets certain moral demands,
leaves the problem essentially untouched. Why should
spirit have fallen in the first instance, or made any beginning
in sin and illusion ?

It would have been better, for the moral and religious
purposes of these sages, to have observed and respected the
prose facts, and admitted that each little spirit falls for the
first time when the body is generated which it is to dwell
in. It never, in fact, existed before ; it is the spirit of that
body. Its transcendental prerogatives and its impersonal
aims are by no means inconsistent with that humble fact :
they seem inconsistent only to those who are ignorant of
the life and fertility of nature, which breeds spirit as naturally
as the lark sings. Aspiration to liberate spirit from absorp
tion in finite existence is in danger of missing its way if it
is not enlightened by a true theory of existence and of

212 LATER SOLILOQUIES

spirit ; for it is utterly impossible to free the spirit materially,
since it is the voice of matter, but by a proper hygiene it
can be freed ideally, so that it ceases to be troubled by its
sluggish instrument, or conscious of it. In these matters
the Indians were the sport of the wildest fancy. They
mistook their early poetry for a metaphysical revelation,
and their philosophy was condemned to turn in the most
dreary treadmill of commentaries and homilies, without
one ray of criticism, or any revision of first principles.
Nevertheless, all their mythology and scholasticism did not
invalidate (as they did not in the Catholic church afterwards)
the initial spiritual insight on which their system rested.
The spirit, viewed from within, is omnipresent and timeless,
and must be spoken of as falling, or coming down, or entering
(as Aristotle puts it) through the house-door. Spirit calls
itself a stranger, because it finds the world strange ; and it
finds the world strange because, being the spirit of a very
high-strung and perilously organized animal, it is sensitive
to many influences not harmonious with its own impulses,
and has to beg its daily bread. Yet it is rich in resource ;
and it gives itself out for a traveller and tells marvellous
lies about its supposed native land, where it was a prince
and an omnipotent poet. These boasts serve the spirit as
a declaration of independence, and a claim to immense
superiority above the world. This independence, however,
is really only the independence of ignorance, that must
think and act at random ; and the spirit would add sanity
to its spirituality if it recognized the natural, precarious,
and exquisite life of which it is the spirit.

Sanity, thy name is Greece. The Greek naturalists
saw (what it needs only sanity to see) that the infinite
substance of things was instinct with a perpetual motion
and rhythmic order which were its life, and that the spirit
of man was a spark from that universal fire. They made
a magnificent beginning in understanding what the order
of nature is, and what is the relation of its substance to its
spirit. They were much nearer in their outlook and their
wisdom to the Indians than we are apt to imagine. The
Indians meant to be naturalists too ; all serious philo
sophers must somehow make a naturalism of their chosen
elements ; only the Indians were carried away by an

THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY 213

untutored imagination. The Greeks, for their part, also
meant to be discerners of substance like the Indians, and
sharers in the divine life. The object which they believed
in and studied was precisely the same as that which the
Indians felt to be breathing deeply around and within
them : it was the infinite substance and life of things ;
all things not as they appear but as they truly are. This
is the object which animals envisage in their perceptions
from the beginning. The sciences, and all honest specula
tion, only substitute more refined ideas for the images of
sense, to be descriptions of the same objects which the
images of sense reveal. The notion that the object of
sense is the very image created in sensation, or is an idea
constructed afterwards by the intellect, is an aberration
of confused psychologists ; the intellectual construction,
like the sensuous image, is and is meant to be only a symbol
for the substance, whatever it^nay be, which confronts
the living being when he eats or looks or frames a
scientific hypothesis. Natural things, in their undiscovered
inner texture, are the only things-in- themselves, and the
object of every practical perception is the thing-in-itself,
whatever its nature may happen to be.

When we enlarge our thoughts, and take in the world,
as it were, at a glance, the object does not become more
metaphysical than when we take common things singly.
The Greeks, too, looked up into the heavens and cried,
" The All is one." It was just what the Indians had said,
shutting their eyes and di inking in an infinite draught of
nothing ; but the outward glance, the docility to fact,
in the Greeks made a new thought of it, and a true one.
What was now discovered was the system of nature ;
the spirit was naturalized in its source ; it was set like a
young plant in its appropriate flowei-pot, where it might
wax and bloom. It did grow there, but not to its primeval
size. These knowing Greeks were not saints and hermits,
like the venerable Indians ; they were merchants, sniffing
travellers, curiosity-hunters, who turned pebbles over and
culled herbs, breeders of animals, or wandering sooth
sayers with a monkey on their shoulder ; and in naturalizing
the spirit they stultified it. Why should knowledge of the
world make people worldly ? It ought to do the exact

214 LATER SOLILOQUIES

opposite. The Indians had, in their way, a most profound
and mature knowledge of the world ; they knew perfectly
what it could yield to the spirit, and what it was worth.
But lost in their inner experience they invented for nature
what structure they chose, fantastically attenuating and
inflating it as in a dream. Apparently there is not energy
jenough in the human intellect to look both ways at once,
;and to study the world scientifically whilst living in it
spiritually.

The Greeks in their sanity discovered not only the
natural world but the art of living well in it. Besides
physics they founded ethics and politics. Bat here again
progress was prevented by the rejection or perversion of
the greater thing in the interests of the lesser. Specu-
latively at least some just conception of the world we live
in, and of our place and destiny there, is more important
than the choice of a definite way of life ; for animals and
man have, quite legitimately, each his own habits and
pleasures, but they all crawl under the same heaven, and
if they think of it at all, they should not blaspheme against
it. The Greek naturalists had conceived nature rightly ;
and their sentiments and maxims, whilst very properly
diverse, had all of them a certain noble frankness in the
presence of the infinite world, of which they begged no
favours. It was precisely these personal sentiments and
maxims, and policy in the government of cities, that
interested the Greeks most ; and the Sophists and Socrates
affected to care nothing about natural science, unless it
could make their pot boil. This utilitarianism was
humorous in Socrates, and in some of the Sophists unprin
cipled ; but the habit of treating opinions about nature
as rhetorical themes, or as more or less edifying myths,
had disastrous consequences for philosophy. It created
metaphysics. Metaphysics is not merely speculative
physics, in which natural science is extended imagina
tively in congruous ways, anticipating what might some
day be discovered. This is what the naturalists had done,
and their theories were simply physical or cosmological.
But after Socrates a theory constructed by reasoning, in
terms of logic, ethics, and a sort of poetic propriety, was
put in the place of physics ; the economy of the human

THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY 215

mind was projected into the universe ; and nature, in the
works of the metaphysicians, held the mirror up to man.
Human nature and the human mind, which were thus made
to rule the world, are in reality a very small incident in
it ; they are proper to one animal ; they are things of
yesterday and perhaps not of to-morrow. This is nothing
against them in their place, as it is nothing against the
daisy that it is humble, nor against the spray of the sea
that its flight is violent and brief. The Platonic, British,
and German schools of philosophy advance our knowledge
of ourselves ; what a pity that they were not content to
cultivate their own gardens, where so many moral fruits
and psychological flowers might be made to grow, but have
insisted that their domestic vegetables are the signs of the
zodiac, and that the universe was made to illustrate their
horticulture !

Taken for what they really are, these humanistic
philosophies express different sides of human nature.
The best (and earliest) is the Platonic, because the side of
human nature which it expresses and fosters is the spiritual
side. Platonic metaphysics projects into the universe the
moral progress of the soul. It is like a mountain lake,
in which the aspirations and passions of a civilized mind
are reflected upside down ; and a certain tremor and
intensity is added to them in that narrower frame, which
they would hardly have in the upper air. This system
renders the life of the soul more unified and more beautiful
than it would otherwise be. Everything becomes magical,
and a sort of perpetual miracle of grace ; the forms which
things wear to the human mind are deputed to be their
substance ; the uses of life become its protecting gods ;
the categories of logic and of morals become celestial
spheres enclosing the earth. A monstrous dream, if you
take it for a description of nature ; but a suitable allegory
by which to illustrate the progress of the inner life : because
those stages, or something like them, are really the stages
of moral progress for the soul.

The British and German philosophies belong to an
analytic phase of reflection, without spiritual discipline,
and their value is merely psychological. Their subject
matter is human knowledge ; and the titles of many of the

216 LATER SOLILOQUIES

chief works of this school confess that this is their only
theme. Not moral life, much less the natural world, but
simply the articulation of knowledge occupies them ; and
yet, by the hocus-pocus of metaphysics, they substitute
this human experience for the whole universe in which it
arises. The universe is to be nothing but a flux of percep
tions, or a will positing an object, or a tendency to feign
that there is a world. It would ill become me, a pupil of
this philosophy, to deny its profundity. These are the
heart-searchings of " a creature moving about in worlds
not realized." It is a wonderful thing to spin out in
soliloquy, out of some unfathomed creative instinct, the
various phases of one's faith and sensibility, making an
inventory of one's intellectual possessions, with some
notes on their presumable or reported history. I love the
lore of the moral antiquary ; I love rummaging in the
psychological curiosity shop. The charm of modern life
is ambiguous ; it lies in self -consciousness. Egotism has
its tender developments ; there is a sort of engaging purity
in its perplexities and faithful labours. The German soul
has a great volume, and Hamlet is heroic even in his
impotence. When in this little glow-worm which we call
man there is so much going on, what must not all nature
contain in its immensity ? Yet all these advances in
analysis and in psychological self-knowledge, far from
enriching the modern philosopher and giving him fresh
hints for the interpretation of the great world, have been
neutralized, under the guise of scepticism, by a total
intellectual cramp or by a colossal folly. This thoughtful
dog has dropped the substance he held in his mouth, to
snatch at the reflection of it which his own mind gave him.
It is wonderful with what a light heart, with what self-
satisfaction and even boasts, the youngest children of the
philosophical family jettison all their heirlooms. Fichte
and Nietzsche, in their fervid arrogance, could hardly
outdo the mental impoverishment of Berkeley and Hume
in their levity : it had really been a sight for the gods to
see one of these undergraduates driving matter out of the
universe, whilst the other drove out spirit.

THE PSYCHE 217

49
THE PSYCHE

ENGLISH poetry and fiction have expressed the inner man
far better than British philosophy has defined him. He is
a hidden spring, a source of bubbling half-thoughts and
characteristic actions, and the philosophers have called
him a series of ideas. Ideas are rather his weak point.
Idealism, on principle, leaves no room for anything latent ;
but in a living being, especially in a nice Englishman,
what is latent is the chief thing. The vital organs are
under the skin and far more complicated, I suspect, than
anatomy would lead us to imagine : the case is somewhat
as if some giant in remote space should examine the surface
of our earth with a glass, measuring its motion round the
sun and perhaps round its own axis, but regarding as
perfectly inexplicable and unmeaning the coursing of
ships, the march of armies and migrations, the change of
forests into cornfields, and of cornfields into deserts. So,
perhaps, far beyond the reach of any microscope, the
politic congregation of atoms within us is busy in its
curiously organic and curiously aimless way : sustaining
on the whole, until disease or death supervenes, the inter
national peace and commerce of the animal body. How
much wireless telegraphy, how many alliances, and how
many diplomatic compromises there must be in our system
for the human body to live at all ! But psychological
philosophers, like children, think the whole economy of life
the simplest thing in the world : experience, they say, just
comes as it does come ; as the boy, asked where he would
get the money necessary for all the fine things he said he
would do when he was a man, replied, full of empirical
wisdom, " Out of my pocket, like papa ! " Experience
is the paternal pocket of these philosophers ; they have
not discovered the financial system, the life of the body,
which fills that minute and precarious reservoir.

It is not only a stronger glass that the remote giant
would need to disclose to him the life of the earth ; he
would need imagination akin to the human, which such a
giant would probably not possess. For suppose anatomy

2i8 LATER SOLILOQUIES

had done its best or its worst, and had completely mapped
the machinery of the human automaton ; and suppose
at the same time the modern dream-readers and diviners
had unearthed all a man's infant concupiscences and
secret thoughts : there would still be something essential
undiscovered. I do not mean that behind the whole
physical machinery there would be another material
agency, another force or set of events ; nor that besides
the totality of mental discourse, remembered or un-
remembered, there would be more thinking elsewhere :
the hypothesis is that all that exists in these spheres has
been surveyed, and assigned to its place in the evolving
system. What has been so far ignored is something on
another plane of being altogether, which this automatic
life and this mental discourse involve, but do not
contain. It is the principle of both and of their relation ;
the system of repetitions, correspondences, developments,
and ideal unities created by this march of human
life in double column. For instance, men are mortal ;
they are born ; they are begotten by sexual fertilization ;
they have a childhood ; their passions and thoughts flow
in a certain general order ; and there are units in the human
world called persons, nations, interests, purposes. I do
not refer to the ideas of these things in the mental discourse
of this or that man ; but to the groups or cycles of facts
designated by these ideas. To perceive these groups or
cycles requires a certain type of intelligence : but intelli
gence does not invent them without cause ; it finds the
order which it designates by some word, some metaphor,
or some image.

That this order of human life is something natural, and
not a fiction of discourse, appears in many ways. The
relation of discourse itself to physical life is one proof of it.
Mental discourse is the inner luminosity or speech that
accompanies dramatic crises in the fortunes of the body ;
it is not self-generated ; it is always the expression of
another event, then occurring in the body, as is a cry of
pain ; and it is usually, at the same time, a report of still
another event that has already occurred beyond the body,
as is a memory or a perception. Feeling and thought are
perpetually interrupted and perpetually renewed by some-

THE PSYCHE 219

thing not themselves. Their march, logic, and sanity, no
less than their existence, translate into mental language
an order proper to material events. A sense of comfort
is the symptom of a good digestion ; pain expresses a
lively discord in the nervous system, and pleasure a lively
harmony. When we can scarcely live, because something
is stifling us, we hate that thing ; and when we breathe
more freely because something approaches, we love it.
Spirit everywhere expresses the life of nature, and echoes
its endeavours ; but the animal life which prompts these
feelings is itself not arbitrary : it passes through a cycle
of changes which are pre-ordained. This predetermined,
specific direction of animal life is the key to everything
moral ; without it no external chcumstance could be
favourable or unfavourable to us ; and spirit within us
would have no reason to welcome, to deplore, or to notice
anything. What an anomaly it would seem to a free
spirit (if there could be such a thing) that it should care
particularly for what happens in the body of some animal,
or that it should see one set of facts rather than another,
and this in so partial and violent a perspective ! But spirit
does, and must, do this ; and it is an absurd and satanic
presumption on its part to profess that it could exist, or
be a spirit at all, if it were not the spirit of some body,
the voice of some animal heart. To have a station in
matter, and to have interests in the material world, are
essential to spirit, because spirit is life become articulate,
experience focussed in thought and dominated ideally ; but
experience and life are inconceivable unless an organism
with specific capacities and needs finds itself in an environ
ment that stimulates it variously and offers it a conditioned
career.

Science as yet has no answer to this most important
of all questions, if we wish to understand human nature :
namely, How is the body, and how are its senses and
passions, determined to develop as they do ? We may
reply : Because God wills it so ; or Because such is the
character of the human species ; or Because mechanical
causes necessitate it. These answers do not increase our
scientific understanding in the least ; nevertheless they
are not wholly vain : for the first tells us that we must be

220 LATER SOLILOQUIES

satisfied with ignorance ; the second that we must be
satisfied with the facts ; and the third, which is the most
significant, that these facts are analogous in every province
of nature. But how close are these analogies ? Mechan
ism is one habit of matter, and life is another habit of
matter ; the first we can measure mathematically and
forecast accurately, the second we can only express in
moral terms, and anticipate vaguely ; but that the
mechanical habit runs through the vital habit, and con
ditions it, is made obvious by the dependence of life on
food, on time, on temperature, by its routine in health
and by its diseases, by its end, and above all by its origin ;
for it is a habit of matter continuous with other inorganic
habits, and (if evolution is true) arising out of them. In
any case, life comes from a seed in which it lies apparently
dormant and arrested, and from which it is elicited by
purely mechanical agencies. On the other hand, the seed
reacts on those agencies in a manner as yet inexplicable by
what we know of its structure ; and its development
closely repeats (though perhaps with some spontaneous
variation) the phases proper to the species.

To this mysterious but evident predetermination of
normal life by the seed the ancients gave the name of
soul ; but to us the word soul suggests a thinking spirit,
or even a disembodied one. It is totally incredible that a
thinking spirit should exist in the seed, and should plan
and carry out (by what instruments ?) the organization of
the body ; and if so wise and powerful and independent
a spirit lay in us from the beginning, or rather long before
our birth, how superfluous a labour to beget us at all, and
how unkind of it to dangle after it, in addition to its own
intelligence, these poor blundering and troubled thoughts
of which alone we are aware ! Evidently the governing
principle in seeds is no soul in this modern sense, no thinking
moral being ; it is a mysterious habit in matter. Whether
this total habit is reducible to minor habits of matter,
prevalent in the world at large, is the question debated
between mechanical and vitalist psychologists ; but it is
a stupid controversy. The smallest unit of mechanism is
an event as vital, as groundless, and as creative as it is
possible for an event to be ; it summons fresh essences into

THE PSYCHE 221

existence, which the character of the essences previously
embodied in existence by no means implied dialectically.
On the other hand, the romantic adventure of life, if it is
not a series of miracles and catastrophes observed ex post
facto, must be a resultant of simpler habits struggling or
conspiring together. However minute, therefore, or how
ever comprehensive the units by which natural processes
are described, they are equally vital and equally mechanical,
equally free and (for an observer with a sufficient range of
vision) equally predictable. On the human scale of ob
servation it is the larger habits of living beings that are
most easily observed ; and the principle of these habits,
transmitted by a seed, I call the Psyche : it is either a
complex of more minute habits of matter, or a mastering
rhythm imposed upon them by the habit of the species.
Many Greek philosophers taught that the Psyche was
material ; and even Plato, although of course his Psyche
might eventually take to thinking, regarded it as primarily
a principle of motion, growth, and unconscious government ;
so that the associations of the word Psyche are not re
pugnant, as are those of the word soul, to the meaning I
wish to give to it : that habit in matter which forms the
human body and the human mind.1

There is, then, in every man a Psyche, or inherited
nucleus of life, which from its dormant seminal condition

1 I beg the learned to notice that the Psyche, as I use the term,
is not a material atom but a material system, stretching over both
time and space ; it is not a monad ; it has not the unity proper
to consciousness ; nor is it a mass of " subconscious," mental
discourse. The Psyche may be called a substance in respect to
mental and moral phenomena which (I think) are based on modes
or processes in matter, not on any material particle taken singly ;
but the Psyche is not a substance absolutely, since its own sub
stance is matter in a certain arrangement — in other words, body.
Matter may be called mind-stuff or psychic substance inasmuch as
it can become on occasion the substance of a Psyche, and through
the Psyche the basis of mind ; but of course not in the sense that
matter may be an aggregate of thinking spirits. Mental events
may be called psychic when we consider their origin rather than
their essence, as certain pleasures are called material, although
pleasures, in being, are all equally spiritual. " Psychic phenomena "
are crudely material, and " psychical research " has for its object,
not spirits in another world, but the habits of matter that produce
apparitions.

222 LATER SOLILOQUIES

expands and awakes anew in each generation, becoming
the person recognized in history, law, and morals. A
man's body is a sort of husk of which his Psyche (itself
material) is the kernel ; and it is out of the predispositions
of this living seed, played upon by circumstances, that his
character and his mind are formed. The Psyche's first
care is to surround itself with outer organs, like a spider
with its web ; only these organs remain subject to her
central control, and are the medium by which she acts
upon outer things, and receives, in her patient labour, the
solicitations and rebuffs of fortune. The Psyche, being
essentially a way of living, a sort of animated code of
hygiene and morals, is a very selective principle : she is
perpetually distinguishing — in action, if not in words —
between good and bad, right and wrong. Choice is the
breath of her nostrils. All the senses, instincts, and passions
are her scouts. The further she extends her influence the
more she feels how dependent she is on external things,
and the more feverishly she tries to modify them, so as
to render them more harmonious with her own impulses.

At first, when she was only a vegetative Psyche, she
waited in a comparatively peaceful mystical torpor for the
rain or the sunshine to foster her, or for the cruel winter
or barbarous scythe to cut her down ; and she never would
have survived at all if breeding had not been her chief
preoccupation ; but she distributed herself so multitudin-
ously and so fast amongst her children, that she has sur
vived to this day. Later, she found a new means of safety
and profit in locomotion ; and it was then that she began
to perceive distinct objects, to think, and to plan her
actions — accomplishments by no means native to her. Like
the Chinese, she is just as busy by night as by day. Long
before sunrise she is at work in her subterranean kitchen
over her pots of stewing herbs, her looms, and her spindles ;
and with the first dawn, when the first ray of intuition
falls through some aperture into those dusky spaces, what
does it light up ? The secret springs of her life ? The
aims she is so faithfully but blindly pursuing ? Far from
it. Intuition, floods of intuition, have been playing for
ages upon human life : poets, painters, men of prayer,
scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have been intent on

THE PSYCHE 223

their several visions ; yet of the origin and of the end of
life we know as little as ever. And the reason is this :
that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like
a hand or an antenna ; it is a miraculous child, far more
alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter,
and brooding meditation. This strange child — who could
have been his father ? — is a poet ; absolutely useless and
incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new
burden on her shoulders, because she can't help feeding
and loving him. He sees ; which to her is a mystery,
because although she has always acted as if, in some
measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen
and never can see anything. Nor are his senses, for all
their vivacity, of any use to her. For what do they
reveal to him ? Always something irrelevant : a shaft of
dusty light across the rafters, a blue flame dancing on the
coals, a hum, a babbling of waters, a breath of heat or
of coolness, a mortal weariness or a groundless joy — all
dream-images, visions of a play world, essences painted on
air, such as any poet might invent in idleness. Yet the
child cares about them immensely : he is full of sudden
tears and of jealous little loves. " Hush, my child," says
good mother Psyche, " it's all nonsense." It is not for
those fantastic visions that she watches : she knits with
her eyes shut, and mutters her same old prayers. She has
always groped amidst obstacles like a mole pressing on
where the earth is softest. She can tell friends from enemies
(not always correctly) by a mysterious instinct within her,
and the rhythm, as it were, of their approaching step. She
is long-suffering and faithful, like Penelope ; but when hard-
pressed and at bay she becomes fierce. She is terribly
absolute then, blindly bent on vengeance and wild de
struction. At other times she can melt and be generous ;
in her beehive she is not only the congregation of workers,
but also the queen. Her stubborn old-womanish temper
makes her ordinarily unjust to her best impulses and
hypocritical about her worst ones. She is artful but not
intelligent, least of all about herself. For this reason she
can never understand how she gave birth to such a thankless
child. She hardly remembers the warm ray from the sun
or from some other celestial source which one day pierced

224 LATER SOLILOQUIES

to her heart, and begat there this strange uneasiness, this
truant joy, which we call thought. Seeing how quick and
observant the brat is, she sometimes sends him on errands ;
but he loiters terribly on the way, or loses it altogether,
forgets what he was sent for, and brings home nothing but
strange tales about Long-noses and Helmets-of-gold, whom
he says he has encountered. He prefers the poppies to
the corn, and half the mushrooms he picks are of the
poisonous variety ; he sometimes insists on setting apart
his food for imaginary beings called the dead or the gods ;
and worst of all, he once ravished and married a fairy,
whom he called Truth ; and he wished to bring her to live
with him at home. At that, good mother Psyche naturally
put her foot down. No hussies here ! Yet there are
moments when she relents, when her worn old hands rest
in her lap, when she remembers and wonders, and two
cold tears trickle down from her blind eyes. What is the
good of all her laboui ? Has it all been, perhaps, for his
sake, that he might live and sing and be happy ? Even
in her green days, in her cool vegetable economy, there
had been waste ; she had unwittingly put forth flowers she
could not see and diffused a fragrance that eluded her.
Now her warmer heart has bred this wilder, this diviner
folly : a wanton sweetness shed by her longer travail and
a flower of her old age. But he forgets her in his selfishness,
and she can never, never understand him.

50
REVERSION TO PLATONISM

I HEAR that Oxford is reading Plotinus — a blessed change
from Hegel. The pious mind is still in the age of mytho
logy ; science has confused its own lessons, for want of
a philosopher who should understand them ; and what
matters, so long as the age of mythology lasts, is that the
myths that occupy the fancy should be wise and beautiful,
and should teach men to lay up their treasures in heaven.
The philosophy of Plotinus does this, and does it magnifi
cently. Like that of Plato and of Aristotle it is little more

REVERSION TO PLATONISM 225

than a rhetorical inversion or perpetual metaphor, express
ing the aim of life under the figure of a cosmos which is
animate and which has already attained its perfection.
Considering the hurried life which we are condemned to
lead, and the shifting, symbolic ideas to which we are
confined, it seems hardly worth while to quarrel with such
inspired fabulists, or to carp at the cosmic dress in which
they present their moralities. Gentle, secluded, scholastic
England does well to platonize. It had never ceased to do
so. In spite of the restiveness, sometimes, of barbarian
blood, in spite of Hebraic religion and Germanic philo
sophy, the great classical tradition has always been seated
here ; and England has shared, even if with a little reserve
and mistrust, in the ecclesiastical, courtly, military, and
artistic heritage of Europe. A genuine child of the past,
who is bred to knowledge of the world, and does not plunge
into it greedily like a stranger, cannot worship the world ;
he cannot really be a snob. Those who have profited by
a long life cannot possibly identify the divine life with
the human. They will not be satisfied with a philosophy
that is fundamentally worldly, that cannot lift up its heart
except pragmatically, because the good things are hanging
from above, or because the long way round by righteousness
and the ten commandments may be the shortest cut to
the promised land. Their love of wisdom will not be merely
provisional, nor their piety a sort of idyllic interlude,
penitent but hopeful, comforting itself with the thought
that the sour grapes will soon be ripe, and oh, so delicious !
They will not remember the flesh-pots of Egypt with an
eternal regret, and the flesh-pots of Berlin and New York
will not revive their appetite.

Spirit is not an instrument but a realization, a fruition.
At every stage, and wherever it peeps out through the
interstices of existence, it is a contemplation of eternal
things. Eternal things are not other material things by
miracle existing for ever in another world ; eternal things
are the essences of all things here, when we consider what
they are in themselves and not what, in the world of fortune,
they may bring or take away from us personally. That is
why piety and prayer are spiritual, when they cease to be.
magic operations or efforts of a celestial diplomacy : they

Q

226 LATER SOLILOQUIES

lead us into the eternal world. Platonism is a great
window in the same direction. It is well to open it afresh.
I should not say of the typical Englishman, any more
than of the typical Greek, that he was spiritual ; both are
healthy, and the spirit in them is not so developed as to
sickly o'er their native hue with the pale cast of thought,
nor to surround their heads with any visible aureole of
consuming fire. Yet I think that their very health saves
them both from worldliness : for life would not be healthy
and free, but diseased and slavish, if it were ultimately
turned only towards its instruments and to the pressing
need of keeping itself going ; a life so employed would
not be worth living, and a healthy spirit would abandon it.
The normal Englishman, like the normal Greek, is addressed
to spiritual things, even if distantly ; so that when for any
reason his spiritual life is intensified, he will create or
adopt a spiritual philosophy, like that of Plotinus. His
inner man is selective ; he is accustomed not to accept
unquestioningly the suasion of custom and not to tremble
before material grandeur. He is an explorer ; he has some
notion of the extent and variety of nature, with enough
appreciative contempt for its tropical splendours, moral
and geographical ; it is with a clear inward satisfaction,
even if with some grumbling of the flesh, that he turns
his back upon them for the sake of his sweet, separate, cool,
country life at home. He loves the earth, not the world.
His ideal is that people everywhere should be steady and
happy, in their way, as he is in his ; and if he feels some
glow at the power and influence of his country, or the spread
of his religion, it is not because he covets domination or a
Roman grandiloquent greatness, but because he feels that
when others take to his ways he will be safer in them
himself, and the world more decent. He wishes to be
free, free to choose his walks, his friends, his thoughts,
his employments ; and this freedom, although it may be
employed only on commonplace and earthly things, is
the very principle of spirituality, and a beginning in it.

What spirituality is when developed fully may be seen
clearly in the system of Plotinus. It is a system of morals
inverted and turned into a cosmology ; everything in his
magic universe is supposed to be created and moved by

REVERSION TO PLATONISM 227

the next higher being, to which by nature it aspires ; so
that life everywhere is a continual prayer, and if it cannot
actually shake off its fetters and take wing into a higher
sphere, at least it imitates and worships the forms which
beckon to it from there. All this is a true allegory ; if
any one takes it for natural science he must think it a
very poor speculation ; because if the higher thing in each
instance were really the source of the lower, it never could
have determined the time, place, number, distribution, or
imperfection of its copies ; and the whole drama of creation,
in everything except its tendency and meaning, must be
due to specific and various predispositions in matter, for
which this system, in its scientific impotence, has forgotten
to make room. It would be easy, however, to supply
this defect. We might start, as nature actually did, at
the bottom, and pass at once to the level at which the
Psyche, having organized the vital functions of the human
animal, begins to ask itself what it is living for. The
answer is not, as an unspiritual philosophy would have it :
In order to live on. The true answer is : In order to
understand, in order to see the Ideas. Those Ideas which
the Psyche is able and predestined to discern are such as
are illustrated or suggested by its own life, or by the
aspects which nature presents to it. Each Idea will be
the ideal of something with which the Psyche is naturally
conversant; but the good of all these psychic labours
will lie precisely in clarifying and realizing that ideal.
To envisage and clearly to discern the Idea of what we are
about is the whole of art, spiritually considered ; it is all
the mind can or need do ; and the more singly the spirit
is rapt in the meaning and vision of the work, the more
skilfully the hand and the tongue will perform it. And
the standard and criterion of their skill is in turn precisely
the same vision of the Idea : for, I ask, what makes an
action or a feeling right, except that it clears away obstruc
tions and brings us face to face with the thing we love ?
The whole of natural life, then, is an aspiration after the
realization and vision of Ideas, and all action is for the sake
of contemplation.

Plato and Aristotle had been satisfied to stop at this
stage ; but Plotinus carries us one step further. What is

228 LATER SOLILOQUIES

the good of seeing the Ideas ? I do not ask, of course,
what is its utility, because we have left that behind, but
what is the nature of the excellence which various Ideas
seem to have in common, like beauty, or affinity with the
harmonious and perfected life of the Psyche. Plotinus says
that what lends excellence to the Ideas is the One ; and I
cannot connect — perhaps we ought not to connect — any
idea with those words. But by looking at the matter
naturalistically perhaps we may discover whence the
excellence of Ideas and of the vision of them actually
flows. It flows from health, which is a unity of function, and
it flows from love, which is an emotional unity pervading
that function, and suffusing its object, when it comes before
the mind, with beauty and inexpressible worth. Here, if
I am not mistaken, we have the key to the whole mystery,
both in Plotinus and in Plato. The One or the Good is
the mythical counterpart of moral harmony in the spirit ;
it is the principle by which the Ideas were disentangled
from the detail of experience and the flux of objects, and
it is again the principle by which the Ideas themselves are
consecrated, illumined, and turned into forms of Joy.

Spirituality, then, lies in regarding existence merely
as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely
as a vehicle for joy. Epicurus was far more spiritual
than Moses. But Epicurus could free the spirit only in
the presence of the simplest things ; the universe terrified
him, quite without reason, so that his spirituality was
fumbling, timid, and sad. For Plotinus the universe had
no terrors ; he liked to feel himself consumed and burning
in the very heart of the sun, and poured thence in a flood
of light from sphere to sphere. We, in this remote shore
of time, may catch that ray and retrace it ; it will lead
us into good company.

IDEAS

How comes it that the word Idea, so redolent of Platonism,
has been the fulcrum on which British philosophy has
turned in its effort to dislodge Platonism from its founda-

IDEAS 229

tions, and to lay bare the positive facts ? The vicissitudes
of words are instructive ; they show us what each age
understood or forgot in the wisdom of its predecessors,
and what new things it discovered to which it gave the
old names. The beauty which Plato and the English
saw in Ideas was the same beauty ; they both found in
Ideas the immediate, indubitable object of knowledge.
And nevertheless, hugging the same certitude, they became
sure of entirely different things.

The word Idea ought to mean any theme which atten
tion has lighted up, any aesthetic or logical essence, so
long as it is observed in itself or used to describe some
ulterior existence. Amid a thousand metaphysical and
psychological abuses of the term this purely ideal significa
tion sometimes reappears in polite speech ; for instance
when Athalie says, in Racine :

J 'ai deux f ois, en dormant, revu la m6me ide'e.

Here, perhaps by chance, the word is used with absolute
propriety and its chief implications are indicated. An Idea
is something seen, an immediate presence ; it is something
seen in a dream, or imaginary ; and it is the same Idea
when seen a second time, or a universal. That universals
are present to intuition was the secret of Plato ; yet it is
the homeliest of truths. It comes to seem a paradox,
or even inconceivable, because people suppose they see
what they believe they are looking at, which is some
particular thing, the object of investigation, of desire,
and of action ; they overlook the terms of their thought,
as they overlook the perspective of the landscape. These
terms, which are alone immediate, are all universals.
Belief — the expectation, fear, or sense of events hidden
or imminent — precedes clear perception ; but it is supposed
to be derived from it. Perception without belief would
be mere intuition of Ideas, and no belief in things or ulterior
events could ever be based on it. A seraph who should
know only Ideas would be incapable of conceiving any
fact, or noting any change, or discovering his own spiritual
existence ; he would be mathematics actualized, a land
scape self -composed, and love spread like butter. The
human mind, on the contrary, is the expression of an

230 LATER SOLILOQUIES

animal life, swimming hard in the sea of matter. It
begins by being the darkest belief and the most helpless
discomfort, and it proceeds gradually to relieve this
uneasiness and to tincture this blind faith with more and
more luminous Ideas. Ideas, in the discovery of facts,
are only graphic symbols, the existence and locus of the
facts thus described being posited in the first place by animal
instinct and watchfulness. If we suspend these eager
explorations for a moment, and check our practical haste
in understanding the material structure of things and in
acting upon them, it becomes perfectly obvious that the
data of actual intuition are sounds, figures, movements,
landscapes, stories — all universal essences appearing, and
perhaps reappearing, as in a trance.

I think that Plato in his youth must have seen his
Ideas with this mystical directness, and must have felt
the irritation common to mystics at being called back out
of that poetic ecstasy into the society of material things.
Those essences were like the gods, clear and immortal,
however fugitive our vision of them might be ; whereas
things were in their inmost substance intricate and obscure
and treacherously changeable ; you could never really
know what any of them was, nor what it might become.
The Ideas were our true friends, our natural companions,
and all our safe knowledge was of them ; things were only
vehicles by which Ideas were conveyed to us, as the copies
of a book are vehicles for its sense.

Nevertheless, the happy intuition of pure essences of all
sorts, as life vouchsafes it to the free poet or to the logician,
could not satisfy the heart of Plato. He felt the burden,
the incessant sweet torment, of the flesh ; and when age
— as I think we may detect in the changed tone of his
thoughts — relieved him of this obsession, which had been
also his first inspiration, it only reinforced an obsession of
a different kind, the indignation of an aristocrat and the
sorrow of a patriot at the doom which hung visibly over
his country. The fact that love intervened from the be
ginning in Plato's vision of the Ideas explains why his
Ideas were not the essences actually manifested in ex
perience, as it comes to the cold eye or the mathematical
brain. When love looks, the image is idealized ; it does

IDEAS 231

not show the obvious, but the dreamt-of and the desired.
Platonism is not pure intuition,Jbuj^mfaij^n__cha.rged with
eritfTusiasm. Then, to reinforce this mystification oflFe
ideas' By love, there was the passionate political impulse
to contrast the form things actually wore with that which
they ought to have worn. This double moral bias, of love
and of hate, with its dismissal of almost all given essences
as not the right essences, produced the curious hierarchy of
Platonic Ideas ; themes belonging to the realm of essence
by their ontological texture or mode of being, yet clinging,
like a faithful shadow or simplified echo, to the morphology
of earthly things. The poet in Plato had been entrapped
by the moralist, and the logician enslaved by the legislator.
He turned away from the disinterested vision of the Ideas
in their endless variety ; he lost, he almost blushed to have
possessed, the genial faculty of his anonymous ancestors,
the creators 6f mythology, who could see gods in all things.
He cultivated instead the art of a nearer progenitor of his,
Solon, and attempted to make laws for Athens, for man
kind, and even for the universe. He did it admirably ;
the Timaeus, his book on nature, is a beautiful myth, and
his book on the Laws is a monument of wisdom. But Plato
had grown forgetful of the Ideas, and of the life of intui
tion ; his gaze had become sad, troubled, and hopeless ;
he was preoccupied with making existence safe. But
how should existence be safe ? How should those tiny
nut-shells — his walled city and his walled cosmos — keep
afloat for ever in this rolling sea of vagueness and
infinity ?

When breeding or conscience suppresses a man's genius,
his genius often takes its revenge and reasserts itself, by
some indirection, in the very system that crushed it. This
happened to paganism when, being stamped out by Chris
tianity, it turned Christianity into something half pagan.
It happened also to Plato when, the world having distracted
him from his Ideas, he made a supernatural world out of
them, to govern and correct this nether world, in which he
was forced to live. To say that Ideas govern the world is
safe and easy, if these Ideas are merely names for the forms
which the world happens to wear. Nature is bound to
present some Idea or other to the mind ; but the Ideas it

232 LATER SOLILOQUIES

presents actually will be only a few, and not the most
welcome, since this world is a most paradoxical, odd, and
picturesque object, and not at all the sort of world which
the human mind (being a highly specialized part of it)
would have made or can easily believe to be real. The
Ideas which a philosopher says govern the world are not
likely to be its true laws ; and, if he has really drawn
them from observation, they cannot possibly be all, nor
the best, Ideas on which his free mind would have chosen
to dwell. The truth, which is a standard for the naturalist,
for the poet is only a stimulus ; and in many an idealist
the poet debauches the naturalist, and the naturalist
paralyses the poet. The earth might well upbraid Plato
for trying to build his seven -walled cloud-castle on her
back, and to circumscribe her in his magic circles. Why
should she be forbidden to exhibit any other essences than
those authorized by this metaphysical Solon ? Why should
his impoverished Olympian theology be imposed upon her,
and ah1 her pretty dryads and silly fauns, all her harpies
and chimeras, be frowned upon and turned into black
devils ? How these people who would moralize nature
hate nature ; and if they loved nature, how sweetly and
firmly would morality take its human place there without
all this delusion and bluster ! But I am not concerned so
much with the violence done by Plato to nature ; nature
can take care of herself, and being really the mother even
of the most waspish philosopher, with his sting and his
wings and his buzzing, she can comfortably find room for
him and his system amongst her swarming children. I
wish I knew if the real wasps, too, have a philosophy, and
what it is ; probably as vital and idealistic as that of the
Germans. But I am grieved rather at the servitude and
at the stark aspect imposed on the Platonic Ideas by their
ambition to rule the world. They are like the shorn
Samson in the treadmill ; they have lost the radiance and
the music of Phoebus Apollo. Socrates taught that to do
wrong is to suffer harm ; and his Ideas, in establishing
their absurd theocracy over nature, were compelled to
bend their backs to that earth -labour, and to become
merely a celestial zoology, a celestial grammar, and a
celestial ethics. Heaven had stooped to rule the earth,

IDEAS 233

and the crooked features of the earth had cast their
grotesque shadow on heaven.

This is the first chapter in the sad history of Ideas.
Now for the second.

The honest Englishman does not care much for Ideas,
because in his labour he is occupied with things and in
his leisure with play, or with rest in a haze of emotional
indolence : but finding himself, for the most part, deep in
the mess of business, he is heartily desirous of knowing
the facts ; and when, in his scrupulous inquiry into the
facts, he finds at bottom only Ideas, and is constrained to
become a philosopher against his will, he contrives, out of
those very Ideas, to elicit some knowledge of fact. Ideas
are not intrinsically facts, but suppositions ; they are
descriptions offering themselves officiously as testimonials
for facts whose character remains problematical, since, if
there were no such facts, the Ideas would still be the same ;
yet, says the melancholy Jaques to himself, "Is it not a
fact that I have made this dubious supposition ? Am I
not entertaining this Idea ? This sad but undeniable ex
perience of mine, not the fact which I sought nor the Idea
which I found, is the actual fact, and the undeniable ex
istence." Thus the occurrence of any experience, or the
existence of any illusion, assumes the names both of fact
and of idea in his vocabulary, and the existence of ideas
becomes the corner-stone of his philosophy.

The most candid and delightful of English philosophers
(who was an Irishman) was Berkeley. In his ardent youth,
like Plato, he awoke to pure intuition : he saw Ideas, or
at least he saw that he did not see material things ; but
instead of studying these Ideas for their own sake with a
steadier gaze, he took up the disputatious notion of denying
that material things existed at all, because he could not
see them. It was a great simplification ; and if he had not
had conventional and apologetic axes to grind, he might
have reached the radical conclusion, familiar to Indian
sages, that nothing could exist at all, least of all himself.
Language, however, and the Cartesian philosophy, made it
easy for him to assume that of course he existed, since he
saw these Ideas ; and he was led by a malicious demon to
add, that the Ideas existed too, since he saw them, so long

234 LATER SOLILOQUIES

as they were visible to him. But if he existed only in that
he saw the Ideas, and the Ideas existed in that he saw
them, was there any difference at all between himself seeing
and the Ideas seen ? None, I am afraid : so that he himself,
whom he had proudly called a spirit, would be in truth
only a series of ideas (I spell them now with a small i),
and the ideas — in which he had not stopped to recognize
eternal essences — would be only the pulses of his fugitive
existence.

Here is substance for an excellent ironical system of the
universe, such as some philosopher in Greece might have
espoused ; a flux of absolute intensive existences, variously
coloured and more or less warm, like the sparks of a rocket.
Some scientific philosopher in our day or in the future
may be tempted to work out this system, and it might
have been the true one. But I see an objection to it from
the point of view of British philosophy, which covets
knowledge of fact. The philosopher conceiving this system,
if the system was true, would be only one of those sparks ;
he could have no idea except the idea which he was ; the
whole landscape before him would be but the fleeting
nature of himself. Although, therefore, by an infinitely
improbable accident, his philosophy might be true, he could
have no reason to think it true, and no possibility of not
thinking it so. A genuine sceptic might be satisfied with
this result, enjoying each moment of his being, and laughing
at his own perpetual pretension of knowing anything
further. And since extremes meet, such a mocking sceptic
might easily become, like Plato, a lover of pure Ideas. If
he really abandons all claims, all hopes, all memory which
is more than fantasy, and simply enjoys the illusion of the
moment, he dwells on an Idea, which is all that an illusion
can supply. The immediate has a mystical charm ; it un
veils some eternal essence, and the extreme of renunciation,
like a sacrificial death, brings a supreme security in another
sphere. Berkeley and Hume were little more than boys
when they fell in love with Ideas ; perhaps, if we knew
their personal history, we should find that they were little
children when they first did so, and that pure Essence was
the Beatrice that had secretly inspired all their lives. But
though they were youths of genius, there was a touch in

IDEAS 235

them of the prig ; the immediate, dear as it is to fresh and
honest hearts, was too unconventional for them legally to
wed and to take home, as it were, to their worldly relations.
In England to love Ideas is to sow one's intellectual wild
oats. There may be something healthy and impetuous in
that impulse which is engaging ; but it must not go too
far, and above all it must not be permanent. The British
philosopher dips into idealism in order to reform belief, to
get rid of dangerous shams or uncongenial dogmas, not for
the sake of pure intuition or instant assurance. He wishes
to remove impediments to action ; he hates great remote
objects as he hates popery and policy ; imposing things
are impositions. Better get rid, if possible, of substance
and cause and necessity and abstractions and self and
consciousness. The purpose is to reduce everything to
plain experience of fact, and to rest neither in pure intuition
nor in external existences. For instance, he has two argu
ments against the existence of matter which he finds
equally satisf?xtory : one that matter cannot exist because
he can form no idea of it, and the other that matter cannot
exist because it is merely an idea which he forms. He
descends to the immediate only for the sake of the ulterior,
for the immediate in some other place. If he found himself
reduced to essences actually given now, he would be terribly
unhappy, and I am sure would renounce philosophy as a
bad business, as he did in the person of Hume, his most
profound representative.

Thus European speculation, like the Athalie of Racine,
has twice in its dreams beheld the same Ideas ; but like
that uneasy heroine it has been troubled by the sight, and
has stretched out its arms to grasp the painted shadow.
The first time, instead of Ideas, it found a celestial hierarchy
of dominations and powers, a bevy of magic influences,
angels, and demons. The second time, instead of Ideas,
it found an irrevocable flux of existing feelings, without
cause, purpose, connection, or knowledge. Perhaps if on
a third occasion the Ideas visited a less burdened and pre
occupied soul, that could look on them without apprehen
sion, they might be welcomed for their fair aspect and for
the messages they convey from things, without being, in
their own persons, either deified or materialized.

236 LATER SOLILOQUIES

52
THE MANSIONS OF HELEN

CONCERNING the visions which men have of the gods
there is much uncertainty. It is written that no man
can see God and live ; but I think some evil god or evil
man must be spoken of, and that they come nearer to the
truth who say that the vision of God brings perfect
happiness. I suspect this is true in a humbler and more
familiar sense than is intended in discourses about the
state of the soul in heaven ; for there is a heaven above
every place, and the soul mounts to it in all its thoughts
and actions, when these are perfect. I incline also to
another opinion, which would surprise those religious friends
of mine who call me an atheist ; namely, that whenever
we see anything, we have, or might have if we chose, a
partial vision of God, and a moment of happiness. For
all experience comes to us fatally, from an alien source
which in physics is called matter, in morals power or will,
and in religion God ; so that by his power (as I learned
when a child in my Spanish catechism) God is present in
everything. The same authority added (and how full of
meaning that word is to me now !) that he was also present
in everything by his essence ; since what is brought
unimpeachably before us in any vision is some essence
which, being absolutely indestructible, is in that respect
divine. It is indestructible because, if all trace and
memory of it were destroyed, it would in that very obscura
tion vindicate its essential identity, since not it, but only
things different from it, would now exist. Every essence,
therefore, lies eternally at the very foundations of being,
and is a part of the divine immutability and necessity ;
an intrinsic feature in that Nous or Logos which theologians
tell us is the second hypostasis of the divine nature.
Yet to say that we see God when we see him only in part
is perhaps hazardous and open to objection, because a
part of anything, separated from the rest, becomes a
different being, qualitatively and numerically ; and it
will be better to speak of our visions as visions of angels
or messengers or demigods, having one divine parent and

THE MANSIONS OF HELEN 237

one human. In everything, if we regard it as it is in itself,
and not selfishly, we may find an incarnation or manifesta
tion of deity.

How the divinity of our daily visitants shines out at
certain moments and then again is obscured by our prac
tical haste and inattention, is admirably expressed in the
history of Helen. Her birth was miraculous, and yet
quaintly natural, for her father Zeus, having taken the
form of a swan when he wooed her mother Leda, she was
hatched from a great white egg ; and there was always
something swanlike in the movements of her neck, in the
composure of her carriage, as if borne on still waters, in
the scarcely flushed marble of her skin, and in the lightness
and amplitude of her floating garments. She was hardly
of this world, and it seemed almost a desecration to have
wedded her to any mortal. Yet she offered no resistance
to love ; it was indifferent to her whom she might
enamour, or into what nest of robbers she might be
carried by force. Was it not violence, she said to herself,
to exist on earth at all ? What mattered a shade more or
less of violence ? If she remained in a manner chaste and
inviolate, it was only because she was too beautiful to tempt
the lusts of men. Neither of her two husbands loved or
understood her. Menelaus because he was a dullard, and
Paris because he was a rake, approached her as they would
have approached any other woman, and they found no
great pleasure in her society. Yet wherever she appeared,
every one stopped talking and was motionless ; and she
was worshipped by all who saw her pass at a distance.
Supreme beauty is foreign everywhere, yet everywhere
has a right of domicile ; it opens a window to heaven,
and is a cause of suspended animation and, as it were,
ecstatic suicide in the heart of mortals.

Helen passed her childhood dazed, but with a pleasing
wonder, because she loved her brothers, and they, absorbed
though they were habitually in their violent sports, were
tender to her. When they died, how gladly would she have
followed them and become the third star with them in
heaven ! But she found herself married to Menelaus the
king ; and this her first mansion at Sparta, the narrowest
of citadels, was far from happy. The palace was a great

238 LATER SOLILOQUIES

farm-house, and the talk in it was all of harvests and
cattle and horses and wars. The men were boors, and their
scruples about sacrifices and auguries annoyed her ; being
half divine, she felt no need for religion. " What advantage
is it," she said in her thoughts, " to be a queen when I
am a prisoner, or to be called beautiful where nobody
looks at me."

Accordingly it was with a vague hope and a secret
desire for vengeance that she heard of the approach of a
brilliant stranger, from a far more populous and flourishing
city than Sparta, who came with gifts and a glib tongue
to view the wonders of the island world. When his eyes
fell on her, his unfeigned surprise filled her with exultation.
To be so discerned, for her, was to be won. Those eyes
could recognize divinity. No doubt he was preparing new
fetters for her and new sorrows, but for a moment she
would be free, and in following him she would feel herself
; once more the goddess.

In fact, so long as they sailed the dark-purple sea, or
rested in caves or in island bowers, all was pleasantness
between them. Their very galley, with its white sails
spread, took on something of Helen's beauty, and seemed
a cloud wafted across the Aegean, or the swan, her father,
riding on the rippled reaches of the Meander. Paris
proved a candid and light-hearted lover ; never vexed,
he was all grace and mastery in small matters : one of those
lordly travellers who can feel the charm of nature and of
woman in every clime, however exotic, however pure, or
however impure ; and the incomparable Helen seemed
indeed incomparable to his practised mind. He adored
her, but he preferred other women. Moreover, she found
that at Troy he counted for nothing. He moved amid
battles and councils, quite at home in the scene, but never
consulted ; a prince turned shepherd, a familiar but super
fluous ornament, like a fop or a ballet-dancer that every
body smiled upon and nobody respected. It was given
him in the end to slay the redoubtable Achilles with a
chance arrow, Apollo secretly directing the shaft, but he
was no warrior. It was a useless triumph, as his abduction
of Helen had been an innocent crime : both were the work
of gods laughing at human arrogance. There were doubt-

THE MANSIONS OF HELEN 239

less street rhetoricians in Ilium who upbraided Paris and
Helen, as there are reasoning philosophers and politicians
to-day who attribute the ascendancy or decay of nations
to the ideas that prevail there, forgetting to ask why
those particular ideas have been embraced by those
peoples, when all ideas, in the universal market, are to
be had gratis. The wise old Priam and his counsellors
knew better. They did not disown Paris for his escapade,
as they might so easily have done, nor did they return Helen
to her wronged husband, useless as she was at Troy. They
knew that the confused battles of earth must be fought
over some nominal prize ; men and animals will always
be fighting for something, not because the thing is
necessarily of any value to them, but because they wish
to snatch it from one another. Helen had lent her name
and image to colour an ancient feud, and make articulate
the dull eternal contention between Asia and Europe.
It was for existence that each party was fighting ; but it
added to their courage and self-esteem to say they were
fighting for beauty, and that the victory of their side would
be a victory for the gods. But the gods were in both camps,
and in neither, as in her heart was Helen herself. In her
isolation, her conscience sometimes reproached her, and
she wondered that she never heard these reproaches from
the lips of others. Hector and Priam and the other old
men, even the queen and the gossiping women, treated
her with deference ; but they cared only for Troy and for
their own affairs. If less beset than in her strict old home,
she was more neglected in these spacious palaces, and no
less melancholy. Was it a miracle of generosity that
nobody blamed her, or was it a supreme proof of indifference,
that standing in the centre of the stage she remained un
heeded ? Was she so much a goddess that they thought
her a statue ? Would she be borne away by the victors
like an inert Palladium, to be set up elsewhere on a new
pedestal ? She did not understand that it is not the
vision that men have of the gods that works their safety
or ruin, but that fatal maladjustments, or natural vigour
in them, in shaping their destiny, call that vision down.
Nor is it an idle vision ; for the sight turns the dreary
length of their misery into a tragedy flashing with light

240 LATER SOLILOQUIES

and tears ; and the presence of Helen on those beleaguered
walls, which might have irritated the foolish, consoled the
wise. She was not the cause of their danger nor of their
coming disaster, as she had not been the cause of the
harsh virtues of her Spartan clan ; but as those harsh
virtues had created her beauty, so the wealth and exuberant
civilization of Ilium had recognized it, and made it their
own ; and she was a glory to both nations, for not every
city, of all the cities that perish, has had a queen like her.

When Troy fell at last, when Hector and Paris and
Priam were dead, and Aeneas had escaped just in time,
she waited, impassible, at the gate of the smoking acropolis,
neither glad nor sorry, not ashamed to see her first husband
again and his shouting friends — for she despised them —
nor unwilling to be removed, as it were, into the evening
shadow of her old queenliness. Something told her that
in her second life at Sparta she would be more feared and
more respected ; in her advancing age and intangible
isolation she would be as a priestess whom no one — not
even Menelaus — would dare to approach. Her crime would
be her protection ; her rebellion, proudly acknowledged
and never retracted in spirit, would lift her above all
mankind. Even while still in this world, she would belong
to the other.

There is an obscure rumour that after the fall of Troy
Helen never returned to Sparta but was spirited away
to Egypt, whilst a mere phantasm resembling her ac
companied her dull husband back to his dull fastness by
the pebbly Eurotas. This turn given to the fable hints
darkly at the unearthly truth. Helen was a phantom
always and everywhere ; so long as men fought for her,
taking her image, as it were, for their banner, she presided
over a most veritable and bloody battle ; but when the
battle ceased of itself, and all those heroes that had seen
and idolized her were dead, the cerulean colours of that
banner faded from it ; the shreds of it rotted indistinguish-
ably in the mire, and the hues that had lent it for a moment
its terrible magic fled back into the ether, where wind and
mist, meteors and sunbeams, never cease to weave them.
The passing of Helen was the death of Greece, but Helen
herself is its immortality. Yet why seek to interpret the

THE MANSIONS OF HELEN 241

parable ? There is more depth of suggestion in these
ancient myths than in any abstract doctrine which we
may substitute for them. Homer and his companions
certainly were not writing intentional allegories ; but
they had a sense for beauty and a sense for the flux of
things, and in those two perceptions the whole philosophy
of Ideas is latent. Sight, thought, love arrest essences ;
and time, perpetually undermining the existence that
brings those essences before us, drives them, as fast as we
can arrest them, like a sort of upward flaw, back into
heaven.

t 53
THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS

I DO not conceive the Judgement of Paris as Rubens has
painted it : an agricultural labourer leering at three fat
women of the town who have gone into the country for a
lark. This disrobing of goddesses, though there may be
some ancient authority for it, does not conform to my
principles of exegesis, and I pronounce it heretical.
Goddesses cannot disrobe, because their attributes are
their substance. They are like the images of the Virgin
in Spanish churches ; if you are so ill-advised, you may
take off their crown, their veils, and their stiffly embroidered
conical mantle ; but what will remain will not be our
Lady either of Mercies or of Sorrows, but a pole, with a
doll's head and two hands attached. The spell lies in the
ornaments, because they alone are symbolical and richly
mysterious. Similarly the virtue of those pagan goddesses
did not lie in what each might be in herself, either as a
conscious spirit or as a beautiful titanic body endowed
with free and immortal life ; their relevant virtue was
tutelary, and lay in their patronage of particular crafts
or passions in man. For this reason it was not absurd
that they should be rivals in beauty. Of course in itself
every nature, celestial or even earthly, is incomparable
and perfect in its own way. But goddesses may well
compete for the prize of beauty in the eyes of a mortal ;
it is not their persons that he sees or can see, but their

242 LATER SOLILOQUIES

gifts ; and it is inevitable and right that these should
not attract him equally. The Judgement of Paris is
essentially like the Choice of Hercules, a moral choice and
an expression of character. Only Paris was not asked to
choose between good and evil, but between different
goods ; his three goddesses were rivals like competing
nations or religions : they proposed to him contrasted
pursuits and forms of experience, such as each was wont
to secure for her votaries. Their offers were not bribes,
but tests ; and yet the suspicion is quite justified that they
were tempting him ; because in fact none of them had
true happiness to give. They represented interests, not
reason ; each secretly felt the weakness of her own cause,
and wished to have her claims to superiority (which she
knew to be false) confirmed before the world, even by the
suffrage of fools. A bad conscience loves to be flattered and
reassured ; company consoles it for loss of honour. That
is why these assiduous goddesses run to every youth and
whisper their soft eloquence in his ear.

Methinks I see Juno appearing in a sunlit cloud, with a
diadem of stars, and clothed in a floating garment which
Minerva had so cunningly woven that when seen in a certain
light (in which Juno saw it) it represented the labours of
Hercules, but from any other angle all the colours (which
were those of the peacock) shifted their places and repre
sented the treacheries of Jupiter. She bore the model of a
city girt with seven walls, every gate, bastion, and battle
ment complete, and in the midst of the towering acropolis
a great temple, doubtless that of Juno, surrounded by
smaller temples for the other gods. Raising a white and
queenly hand, as if in warning or in blessing, she spoke
as follows :

" I will give thee dominion over the world and over
thyself, if thou wilt first deliver up thyself and the world
into my keeping. I am skilled in the governance of men,
and my ancient laws, though they seem hard, bring dis
cipline into their lives, and fortify them in seemly habits
of labour and holiness."

" Perhaps," Paris replied, " if the other gods cannot
offer me freedom, I might accept from thee a noble servi
tude."

THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS 243

Minerva took heart at these words, thinking herself
nothing if not emancipated, and interposed her form,
shining in its golden armour, yet obscured by the azure
light of her eyes. " I will give thee," she cried, " philosophy
natural, moral, logical, and rhetorical. I will endue thy
mind with a perfect image of the spheres musically en
closing the earth. Thou shalt possess knowledge of all
genera and species of animals, herbs, seeds, gestations, and
diseases. All measures and proportions, both of numbers
and of forms, shall be clear to thee as the light of day.
The arts of tillage and planting and mining and weaving
and building — all save trade and voyages, forbidden to a
good man — shall have no secrets for thee : to the advan
tage of thy fellow-citizens, if ever they should choose thee
for their legislator."

" Perhaps," Paris again answered, " when I grow weary
of being a shepherd, I may not disdain to become a
philosopher. It is a better pastime for old age. But as
I am no shepherd in reality, but a prince, dwelling on
Mount Ida in this vernal season for pleasure and for the
sake of these rural sights and savours of solitude, so later
I should be no sophist with illusions ; I should merely
entertain my wintry leisure with the fictions of the learned,
as a prince may : for they are other pictures."

Venus, whose marble nakedness was not remarked, so
divine was it and so constitutional, smiled to hear the youth
say this, because it was what she secretly approved, and
she added disdainfully : " Thou art wise enough already
in the use of words ; but what hast thou tasted of ex
perience ? Consider the gift I can give thee : Possession
of the Immediate. Is not this the best ? "

" Yes," he replied, smiling in return, " but I have that
in any case."

It might seem that this version of the Judgement of
Paris errs in not giving a clear victory to Venus and in
saying nothing of Helen ; but such a reproach would be
hasty. Possession of the Immediate had always seemed to
Paris the highest, if not the only, good, as his bucolic life
and pastoral amusements could prove : and when the heart
has chosen, it is not necessary to express in words the
preference for a deity so clearly favoured. To real shep-

244 LATER SOLILOQUIES

herds, born and bred on the mountain-side, Arcadia is full
of dirt, hardship, and poverty ; sunrise and sunset are
heavy to them ; they fatten their sheep in order to shear
and to slaughter them, and they love a green pasture
because it fattens the sheep. So too the eclogues of town
poets, and the toy Arcadias of Versailles or of the carnival,
in their satin slippers and gilded crooks, are a forced
labour, and tedious ; at best a new masquerade in which
the jaded may continue to make love. But there is a
'poetic Arcadia none the less, the real Arcadia mirrored in
a contemplative mind. Idle vision neither is what it looks
at, nor apes it : it is infinitely other, yet in looking forgets
itself, and lends its heart gladly to the spectacle. Paris
shirked none of the labours or bestialities of the country
swain ; with a semi-divine tolerance he relished those
rough sports and those monotonous pipings : anything a
creature can love, some god finds lovable. He tussled
with those wenches, and the crude scent of those smoking
kettles did not turn his stomach. Had it been less mal
odorous at court ? Was there not more freedom, more
laughter, and greater plenty here ? If Paris was not a
hero, at least he was not a snob. He was a truant prince,
a fop become a shepherd, with a body and a mind capable
of great things, but doing easy things from choice. In his
very softness, since it was voluntary, there was a kind of
strength, the strength of indifference, and freedom, and
universal derision. And his cynicism was voluptuous. Idle
vision in him gilded alike everything it saw. He had
chosen, and would never lose, possession of the Immediate.
As to Helen, I have not ignored her. The gods called
Paris Alexander, and a private oracle has revealed to me
that they also had another name for Helen, which was
Doxa or Epiphaneia, that is to say, Glory or Evidence or
(being otherwise interpreted) Seeming or Phantom. She
was not substantial, but a manifestation of something else.
Her beauty was her all, and what was her beauty to her
self ? A myriad potential appearances wait in the intricate
recesses of substance, or in the ethereal web of lights and
motions that vibrates through the infinite, ready for the
quick eye that can discern them. This discernment is at
once a birth and a marriage. No sooner is the fair phantom

THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS 245

called into existence than she has already leapt, as if carried
by destiny, into her lover's arms ; for nothing can be more
longed for, or more rapturously beautiful when it appears,
than perfect evidence is to the mind. And the womb of
nature, too, in its dark fertility, must be relieved to bring
something to light at last. Yet this rare concourse of
desires, and this blissful marriage, proves in the end most
unhappy, for there is sin in it.

As all desperate lovers, in the absence of their true love,
embrace what best they can find, though a false object, so
spirit which, if not entangled in circumstance and heavy
with dreams, would embrace the truth, must embrace
appearance instead. There is a momentary lyrical joy
even in that, because appearance has a being of its own ;
it has form, like Helen, and magic comings and goings,
like visions of the gods : and if spirit were not incarnate
and had nothing to fear or pursue, appearance would be
the only reality it would care to dwell on. It was princely
of Paris to love only the Immediate, but it was inhuman
and unwise ; and Venus had seduced him not only to his
ruin (we must all die sooner or later) but to his disgrace
and perpetual misery. A spirit lodged in time, place, and
an animal body needs to be mindful of existence ; it needs
to respect the past, the hidden, the ulterior. It should be
satisfied with what beauties are visible from its station,
and with such truths as are pertinent to its fate. It should
study appearance for the sake of substance. But as the
joy of a free spirit is in perfect evidence, in Doxa or
Epiphaneia, it inevitably flouts substance and embraces
appearance instead. The Rape of Helen is this adulterous
substitution, dazzling but criminal.

54
ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS

Now that for some years my body has not been visible in
the places it used to haunt (my mind, even then, being
often elsewhere), my friends in America have fallen into
the habit of thinking me dead, and with characteristic

246 LATER SOLILOQUIES

haste and kindness, they are writing obituary notices, as
it were, on my life and works. Some of these reach me
in this other world — the friendly ones, which their authors
send me — and without the aid of any such stratagem as
Swift's, I have the strange pleasure of laughing at my own
epitaphs. It is not merely the play of vanity that enters
into this experience, nor the occasional excuse for being
unfair in return ; there comes with it a genuine discovery
of the general balance of one's character. A man has
unrivalled knowledge of the details of his life and feelings,
but it is hard for him to compose his personage as it
appears in the comedy of the world, or in the eyes of other
people. It is not true that contemporaries misjudge a
man. Competent contemporaries judge him perfectly, much
better than posterity, which is composed of critics no less
egotistical and obliged to rely exclusively on documents
easily misinterpreted. The contemporary can read more
safely between the lines ; and if the general public often
misjudges the men of its own time, the general public hears
little of them. It is guided by some party tag or casual
association, by the malignity or delusion of some small
coterie that has caught its ear : how otherwise should it
judge ideas it has not grasped and people it has not seen ?
But public opinion is hardly better informed about the past
than about the present, and histories are only newspapers
published long after the fact.

As to my person, my critics are very gentle, and I am
sensible of the kindness, or the diffidence, with which they
treat me. I do not mind being occasionally denounced
for atheism, conceit, or detachment. One has to be oneself ;
and so long as the facts are not misrepresented — and I
have little to complain of on that score — any judgement
based upon them is a two-edged sword : people simply
condemn what condemns them. I can always say to
myself that my atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety
towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by
men in their own image, to be servants of their human
interests ; and that even in this denial I am no rude
iconoclast, but full of secret sympathy with the impulses
of idolaters. My detachment from things and persons is
also affectionate, and simply what the ancients called

ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS 247

philosophy : I consent that a flowing river should flow ; I
renounce that which betrays, and cling to that which
satisfies, and I relish the irony of truth ; but my security
in my own happiness is not indifference to that of others :
I rejoice that every one should have his tastes and his
pleasures. That I am conceited, it would be folly to deny :
what artist, what thinker, what parent does not over
estimate his own offspring ? Can I suppress an irresistible
sense of seeing things clearly, and a keen delight in so
seeing them ? Frankly, I think these attitudes of mine
are justified by the facts ; but I entirely understand how
offensive they must be to any one who thinks they are not
justified, or who fears that they may be. Let the irritant
work. The arrows of anger miss their mark. Aimed at
some imaginary evil bird in the heavens, they scarcely
startle the poet wandering in his dell. He hears them pass
over his head and bury their venom far away in the young
grass. Far away too his friends are designing his vain
cenotaph, and inscribing it with seemly words in large
capitals.

On the other hand, in respect to my impersonal opinions,
I notice a little bewilderment, and some obtuseness. Of
course, if people are repelled by the subject or by the
manner (which is an integral part of the thought) and find
it all unintelligible, that is no fault of theirs, nor of mine ;
but I speak of the initiated and of such as are willing to
lend their minds to my sort of lucubration. For instance,
when more than twenty years ago, I wrote some Interpreta
tions of Poetry and Religion, this is what William James
said of them : " What a perfection of rottenness . . . how
fantastic a philosophy ! — as if the ' world of values ' were
independent of existence. It is only as being that one
thing is better than another. The idea of darkness is as
good as that of light, as ideas. There is more value in
light's being." William James was a " radical empiricist/'
so that for him the being of light could not have meant
anything except its being in idea, in experience. The fan
tastic view must therefore be some other ; apparently that
in the realm of unrealized essences, apart from any observer,
one essence can be better than another. But how could
any one attribute such a view to me ? The whole conten-

248 LATER SOLILOQUIES

tion of my book was that the glow of human emotion
lent a value to good poetry which it denied to bad, and to
one idea of God which it denied to another. My position
in this matter was that of empirical philosophy, and of
William James himself. In his book on Pragmatism he
says that the being of atoms is just as good as the being
of God, if both produce the same effects in human ex
perience ; and I remember once mildly protesting to him
on that point, and asking him if, apart from these effects
on us, the existence of God, assuming God to be conscious,
would not have a considerable value in itself ; and he
replied, " Of course ; but I was thinking of our idea."
This was exactly the attitude of my book ; I was thinking
of our religious and poetic ideas, and reducing their value
to what they stood for in the elements of our experience,
or in our destiny.

I think I see, however, where the trouble lies. The
practical intellect conceives everything as a source of
influence. Whether it be matter or other people, or
tutelary spirits, that which we envisage in action and
passion is not our idea of these objects, but their operation
on us, or our operation on them. Now a source of influence
cannot be non-existent. Accordingly, what concerns
earnest people in their religion is something, they know
not what, which is real. They are not interested in forming
poetic or dramatic pictures of the gods, as the Greeks did
in their mythology, but rather in finding a living God to
help them, as even the Greeks did in their home cultus and
their oracles. This living God, since he is to operate and
to be worked upon, must exist ; otherwise the whole
practice of religion becomes a farce. So also in love or
in science, it would be egotistical and affected to gloat
on our own ideal, turning our backs on the adorable person
or the natural process before us. It is the danger of
empirical and critical philosophy, that it turns our atten
tion stubbornly to the subjective : legitimately, I think,
if the purpose is merely to study the growth and logic of
our beliefs, but illegitimately, if the purpose is malicious,
and if it is assumed that once we have understood how our
beliefs are formed we shall abandon them and believe
nothing. Empiricism and idealism are, as Kant called

ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS 249

them, excellent cathartics, but they are nasty food ; and
if we try to build them up into a system of the universe
the effort is not only self-contradictory (because we ought
then to possess only ideas without beliefs) but the result
is, in the words of William James, fantastic and rotten.

Now, however much I may have studied the human
imagination, I have never doubted that even highly
imaginative things, like poetry and religion, express real
events, if not in the outer world, at least in the inner
growth or discipline of life. Like the daily experience
of the senses and like the ideas of science, they form a
human language, all the terms of which are poetical and its
images dream-images, but which symbolizes things and
events beyond it and is controlled from outside. This
would be perfectly evident to any other animal who should
discover how men see the world or what they think of it :
why should we be less intelligent than any other animal
would be about ourselves ? Enlightenment consists in
coming nearer and nearer to the natural objects that lend
a practical meaning to our mental discourse ; and when
the material significance of our dreams is thus discovered,
we are lost in admiration at the originality, humour, and
pictorial grandeur of the imagery in which our experience
comes to us, as we might be at the decorative marvels of
tapestry or of stained glass : but now without illusion.
For we can now discriminate the rhythms and colour
proper to our mental atmosphere from the extrinsic value
of discourse as a sign for things and events beyond it.
These external things and events make up what we call
nature. It is nature, or some part of nature, or some
movement of nature occurring within us or affecting us,
that is the true existent object of religion, of science, and
of love. The rest is a mere image.

My naturalism is sometimes taxed with being dogmatic,
and if I were anxious to avoid that reproach, I might easily
reduce my naturalism to a definition and say that if ex
perience has any sources whatever, the sum and system of
these sources shall be called nature. I know what specu
lative difficulties cluster about the notion of cause, which in
one sense is quite unnecessary to science; but so long as
time, process, and derivation are admitted at all, events

250 LATER SOLILOQUIES

may be traced back to earlier events which were their
sources ; and this universal flux of events will be called
nature. Any existing persons, and any gods exercising
power, will evidently be parts of nature. But I am not
concerned to avoid dogmatism on such a point. Every
assertion about existence is hazarded, it rests on animal
faith, not on logical proof ; and every argument to support
naturalism, or to rebut it, implies naturalism. To deny
that there are any facts (if scepticism can be carried so
far) is still to dogmatize, no less than it would be to point
to some fact in particular ; in either case we descend into
the arena of existence, which may betray our confidence.
Any fact is an existence which discourse plays about and
regards, but does not create. It is the essence of the
practical intellect to prophesy about nature, and we must
all do it. As to the truth of our prophecy, that is always
problematical, because nature is whatever nature happens
to be ; and as to our knowledge, starting as it does from a
single point, the present position of the thinker, and falling
away rapidly in clearness and certainty as the perspective
recedes, it cannot pretend to draw the outlines of nature
a priori : yet our knowledge of nature, in our neighbour
hood and moral climate, is very considerable, since every
known fact is a part of nature. It is quite idle to
deny, for instance, that human life depends on cosmic
and hygienic influences ; or that in the end all human
operations must run back somehow to the rotation of the
earth, to the rays of the sun, to the moisture and fructifica
tion of the soil, to the ferment there of vegetative and
dreaming spirits, quickened in animals endowed with loco
motion into knowledge of surrounding things : whence the
passionate imaginations which we find in ourselves. I
know that things might have been arranged otherwise ;
and some of those alternative worlds may be minutely
thought out in myth or in philosophy, in obedience to
some dialectical or moral impulse of the human mind ;
but that all those other worlds are figments of fancy,
interesting as poetry is interesting, and that only the
natural world, the world of medicine and commerce, is
actual, is obvious ; so obvious to every man in his sane
moments, that I have always thought it idle to argue the

ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS 251

point. Argument is not persuasive to madmen ; but
they can be won over by gentler courses to a gradual
docility to the truth. One of these gentler courses is this :
to remember that madness is human, that dreams have
their springs in the depths of human nature and of human
experience ; and that the illusion they cause may be
kindly and even gloriously dispelled by showing what
the solid truth was which they expressed allegorically.
Why should one be^angry with dreams, with myth, with
allegory, with madness ? We must not kill the mind,
as some rationalists do, in trying to cure it. The life of
reason, as I conceive it, is simply the dreaming mind
becoming coherent, devising symbols and methods, such
as languages, by which it may fitly survey its own career,
and the forces of nature on which that career depends.
Reason thereby raises our vegetative dream into a poetic
revelation and transcript of the truth. That all this life
of expression grows up in animals living in the material
world is the deliverance of reason itself, in our lucid
moments ; but my books, being descriptive of the imagina
tion and having perhaps some touches of imagination in
them, may not seem to have expressed my lucid moments
alone. They were, however, intended to do so ; and I
ought to have warned my readers more often that such was
the case.

I have no metaphysics, and in that sense I am no
philosopher, but a poor ignoramus trusting what he hears
from the men of science. I rely on them to discover gradu
ally exactly which elements in their description of nature
may be literally true, and which merely symbolical : even
if they were all symbolical, they would be true enough for
me. My naturalism is not at all afraid of the latest theories
of space, time, or matter : what I understand of them, I
like, and am ready to believe, for I am a follower of
Plato in his doctrine that only knowledge of ideas (if we
call it knowledge) can be literal and exact, whilst practical
knowledge is necessarily mythical in form, precisely because
its object exists and is external to us. An arbitrary sign,
indication, or name can point to something unambiguously,
without at all fathoming its nature, and therefore can be
knowledge of fact : which an aesthetic or logical elucida-

252 LATER SOLILOQUIES

tion of ideas can never be. Every idea of sense or science
is a summary sign, on a different plane and scale altogether
from the diffuse material facts which it covers : one
unexampled colour for many rays, one indescribable note
for many vibrations, one picture for many particles of
paint, one word for a series of noises or letters. A word
is a very Platonic thing : you cannot say when it begins,
when it ends, how long it lasts, nor where it ever is ; and
yet it is the only unit you mean to utter, or normally
hear. Platonism is the intuition of essences in the presence
of things, in order to describe them : it is mind itself.

I am quite happy in this human ignorance mitigated
by pictures, for it yields practical security and poetic
beauty : what more can a sane man want ? In this
respect I think sometimes I am the only philosopher
living : I am resigned to being a mind. I have put my
hand into the hand of nature, and a thrill of sympathy
has passed from her into my very heart, so that I can
instinctively see all things, and see myself, from her point
of view : a sympathy which emboldens me often to say
to her, " Mother, tell me a story." Not the fair Sheherazad
herself knew half the marvellous tales that nature spins in
the brains of her children. But I must not let go her hand
in my wonder, or I might be bewitched and lost in the maze
of her inventions.

A workman must not quarrel with his tools, nor the
mind with ideas ; and I have little patience with those
philanthropists who hate everything human, and would
reform away everything that men love or can love. Yet
if we dwell too lovingly on the human quality and poetic
play of ideas, we may forget that they are primarily signs.
The practical intellect is always on the watch for ambient
existences, in order to fight or to swallow them : and if
by chance its attention is arrested at an 'idea, it will
instinctively raise that idea to the throne of power which
should be occupied only by the thing which it stands for
and poetically describes. Ideas lend themselves to idolatry.
There is a continual incidental deception into which we
are betrayed by the fictitious and symbolical terms of our
knowledge, in that we suppose these terms to form the
whole essence of their objects. I think I have never failed

ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS 253

to point out this danger of illusion, and to protest against
idolatry in thought, so much more frequent and dangerous
than the worship of stocks and stones ; but at the same
time, as such idolatry is almost inevitable, and as the
fictions so deified often cover some true force or harmony
in nature, I have sometimes been tempted in my heart to
condone this illusion. In my youth it seemed as if a
scientific philosophy was unattainable ; human life, I
thought, was at best a dream, and if we were not the
dupes of one error, we should be the dupes of another ;
and whilst of course the critic must make this mental
reservation in all his assents, it was perhaps too much to
ask mankind to do so ; so that in practice we were con
demned to overlook the deceptiveness of fable, because
there would be less beauty and no more truth in whatever
theory might take its place. I think now that this despair
of finding a scientific philosophy was premature, and
that the near future may actually produce one : not that
its terms will be less human and symbolical than those to
which we are accustomed, but that they may hug more
closely the true movement and the calculable order of
nature. The truth, though it must be expressed in
language, is not for that reason a form of error. No doubt
the popularizers of science will turn its language into a
revelation, and its images into idols ; but the abstract
character of these symbols will render it easier for the
judicious to preserve the distinction between the things
to be described and the science which describes them.

Was it, I wonder, this touch of sympathy with splendid
error, bred in me by long familiarity with religion and
philosophy, that offended my honest critics ? Now that I
show less sympathy with it, will they be better satisfied ?
I fear the opposite is the case. What they resented was
rather that in spite of all my sympathy, and of all my
despair about science, it never occurred to me to think
those errors true, because they were splendid, except true
to the soul. Did they expect that I should seriously debate
whether the Ghost in Hamlet really came out of Purgatorial
fires, and whether Athena really descended in her chariot
from Olympus and pulled Achilles by his yellow hair when
he was in danger of doing something rash ? Frankly, I

254 LATER SOLILOQUIES

have assumed — perhaps prematurely — that such questions
are settled. I am not able nor willing to write a system
of magic cosmology, nor to propose a new religion. I
merely endeavour to interpret, as sympathetically and
imaginatively as I can, the religion and poetry already
familiar to us ; and I interpret them, of course, on their
better side, not as childish science, but as subtle creations
of hope, tenderness, and ignorance.

So anxious was I, when younger, to find some rational
justification for poetry and religion, and to show that
their magic was significant of true facts, that I insisted
too much, as I now think, on the need of relevance to fact
even in poetry. Not only did I distinguish good religion
from bad by its expression of practical wisdom, and of the
moral discipline that makes for happiness in this world,
but I maintained that the noblest poetry also must express
the moral burden of life and must be rich in wisdom. Age
has made me less exacting, and I can now find quite
sufficient perfection in poetry, like that of the Chinese and
Arabians, without much philosophic scope, in mere grace
and feeling and music and cloud-castles and frolic. I
assumed formerly that an idea could have depth and
richness only if somehow redolent of former experiences
of an overt kind. I had been taught to assign no substance
to the mind, but to conceive it as a system of successive
ideas, the later ones mingling with a survival of the earlier,
and forming a cumulative experience, like a swelling
musical movement. Now, without ceasing to conceive
mental discourse in that way, I have learned, with the
younger generation, to rely more on the substructure, on
the material and psychical machinery that puts this
conscious show on the stage, and pulls the wires. Not that
I ever denied or really doubted that this substructure
existed, but that I thought it a more prudent and critical
method in philosophy not to assume it. Certainly it is a
vast assumption ; but I see now an irony in scepticism
which I did not see when I was more fervid a sceptic ;
namely, that in addressing anybody, or even myself, I
have already made that assumption ; and that if I tried
to rescind it, I should only be making another, no less
gratuitous, and far more extravagant ; I should be assum-

ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS 255

ing that the need of making this assumption was a fatal
illusion, rather than a natural revelation of the existence
of an environment to a living animal. This environment
has been called the unknowable, the unconscious and the
subconscious — egotistical and absurd names for it, as if
its essence was the difficulty we have in approaching it.
Its proper names are matter, substance, nature, or soul ;
and I hope people will learn again to call it by those old
names. When living substance is thus restored beneath
the surface of experience, there is no longer any reason
for assuming that the first song of a bird may not be
infinitely rich and as deep as heaven, if it utters the vital
impulses of that moment with enough completeness.
The analogies of this utterance with other events, or its
outlying suggestions, whilst they may render it more
intelligible to a third person, would not add much to its
inward force and intrinsic beauty. Its lyric adequacy,
though of course not independent of nature, would be
independent of wisdom. If besides being an adequate
expression of the soul, the song expressed the lessons of a
broad experience, which that soul had gathered and
digested, this fact certainly would lend a great tragic
sublimity to that song ; but to be poetical or religious
intrinsically, the mystic cry is enough.

I notice that men of the world, when they dip into my
books, find them consistent, almost oppressively consistent,
and to the ladies everything is crystal - clear ; yet the
philosophers say that it is lazy and self-indulgent of me
not to tell them plainly what I think, if I know myself
what it is. Because I describe madness sympathetically,
because I lose myself in the dreaming mind, and see the
world from that transcendental point of vantage, while at
the same time interpreting that dream by its presumable
motives and by its moral tendencies, these quick and
intense reasoners suppose that I am vacillating in my own
opinions. My own opinions are a minor matter, and there
was usually no need, for the task in hand, that I should
put them forward ; yet as a matter of fact, since I reached
the age of manhood, they have not changed. In my
adolescence I thought this earthly life (not unintelligibly,
considering what I had then seen and heard of it) a most

256 LATER SOLILOQUIES

hideous thing, and I was not disinclined to dismiss it as
an illusion, for which perhaps the Catholic epic might
be substituted to advantage, as conforming better to the
impulses of the soul ; and later I liked to regard all systems
as alternative illusions for the solipsist ; but neither
solipsism nor Catholicism were ever anything to me but
theoretic poses or possibilities ; vistas for the imagination,
never convictions. I was well aware, as I am still, that
any such vista may be taken for true, because all dreams
are persuasive while they last ; and I have not lost, nor
do I wish to lose, a certain facility and pleasure in taking
those points of view at will, and speaking those philosophical
languages. But though as a child I regretted the fact and
now I hugely enjoy it, I have never been able to elude the
recurring, invincible, and ironic conviction that whenever
I or any other person feign to be living in any of those
non-natural worlds, we are simply dreaming awake.

In general, I think my critics attribute to me more
illusions than I have. My dogmatism may be a fault of
temper or manner, because I dislike to stop to qualify or
to explain everything ; but in principle it is raised more
diffidently and on a deeper scepticism than most of the
systems which are called critical. My " essences," for
instance, are blamed for being gratuitous inventions or
needless abstractions. But essences appear precisely when
all inventions are rescinded and the irreducible manifest
datum is disclosed. I do not ask any one to believe in
essences. I ask them to reject every belief, and what they
will have on their hands, if they do so, will be some
essence. And if, believing nothing, they could infinitely
enlarge their imagination, the whole realm of essence would
loom before them. This realm is no discovery of mine ;
it has been described, for instance, by Leibniz in two
different ways ; once as the collection of all possible worlds,
and again as the abyss of non-existence, le neant, of which
he says : " The non-existent ... is infinite, it is eternal,
it has a great many of the attributes of God ; it contains
an infinity of things, since all those things which do not
exist at all are included in the non-existent, and those
which no longer exist have returned to the non-existent."
It suffices, therefore, that we deny a thing for us to recog-

ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS 257

nize an essence, if we know at all what we are denying.
And the essence before us, whether we assert or deny its
existence, is certainly no abstraction ; for there is no other
datum, more individual or more obvious, from which the
abstraction could be drawn. The difficulty in discern
ing essences is simply the very real difficulty which the
practical intellect has in abstaining from belief, and from
everywhere thinking it finds much more than is actually
given.

Profound scepticism is favourable to conventions,
because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any
truer than they are. Fervent believers look for some
system of philosophy or religion that shall be literally
true and worthy of superseding the current assumptions
of daily life. I look for no such thing. Never for a
moment can I bring myself to regard a human system — a
piece of mental discourse — as more than a system of
notation, sometimes picturesque, sometimes abstract and
mathematical. Scientific symbols, terms in which calcula
tion is possible, may replace poetic symbols, which merely
catch echoes of the senses or make up dramatic units out
of appearances in the gross. But the most accurate
scientific system would still be only a method of description,
and the actual facts would continue to rejoice in their own
ways of being. The relevance and truth of science, like
the relevance and truth of sense, are pragmatic, in that
they mark the actual relations, march, and distribution
of events, in the terms in which they enter our experience.

In moral philosophy (which is my chosen subject) I
find my unsophisticated readers, as I found my pupils
formerly, delightfully appreciative, warmly sympathetic,
and altogether friends of mine in the spirit. It is a joy,
like that of true conversation, to look and laugh and cry
at the world so unfeignedly together. But the other
philosophers, and those whose religion is of the anxious
and intolerant sort, are not at all pleased. They think
my morality very loose : I am a friend of publicans and
sinners, not (as they are) in zeal to reform them, but because
I like them as they are ; and indeed I am a pagan and a
moral sceptic in my naturalism. On the other hand (and
this seems a contradiction to them), my moral philosophy

s

258 LATER SOLILOQUIES

looks strangely negative and narrow ; a philosophy of
abstention and distaste for life. What a horrible combina
tion, they say to themselves, of moral licence with moral
poverty ! They do not see that it is because I love life
that I wish to keep it sweet, so as to be able to love it
altogether : and that all I wish for others, or dare to
recommend to them, is that they should keep their lives
sweet also, not after my fashion, but each man in his own
way. I talk a great deal about the good and the ideal,
having learned from Plato and Aristotle (since the living
have never shown me how to live) that, granting a human
nature to which to appeal, the good and the ideal may
be defined with some accuracy. Of course, they cannot
be denned immutably, because human nature is not
immutable ; and they cannot be denned in such a way
as to be transferred without change from one race or
person to another, because human nature is various. Yet
any reflective and honest man, in expressing his hopes
and preferences, may expect to find many of his neighbours
agreeing with him, and when they agree, they may work
politically together. Now I am sometimes blamed for not
labouring more earnestly to bring down the good of which
I prate into the lives of other men. My critics suppose,
apparently, that I mean by the good some particular way
of life or some type of character which is alone virtuous,
and which ought to be propagated. Alas, their propa
gandas ! How they have filled this world with hatred,
darkness, and blood ! How they are still the eternal
obstacle, in every home and in every heart, to a simple
happiness ! I have no wish to propagate any particular
character, least of all my own ; my conceit does not take
that form. I wish individuals, and races, and nations to
be themselves, and to multiply the forms of perfection
and happiness, as nature prompts them. The only thing
which I think might be propagated without injustice to
the types thereby suppressed is harmony ; enough harmony
to prevent the interference of one type with another, and
to allow the perfect development of each type. The good,
as I conceive it, is happiness, happiness for each man
after his own heart, and for each hour according to its
inspiration. I should dread to transplant my happiness

ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS 259

into other people ; it might die in that soil ; and my
critics are the first to tell me that my sort of happiness
is a poor thing in their estimation. Well and good. I
congratulate them on their true loves : but how should I
be able to speed them on their course ? They do not
place their happiness in the things I have, or can give.
No man can set up an ideal for another, nor labour to realize
it for him, save by his leave or as his spokesman, perhaps
more ready with the right word. To find the compara
tively right word, my critics seem to agree, is my art.
Do I not practise it for their benefit as best I can ? Is it
I who am indifferent to the being of light ? Who loves
it more, or basks in it more joyfully ? And do I do
nothing that the light may come ? Is it I who tremble
lest at its coming it should dissolve the creatures begotten
in darkness ? Ah, I know why my critics murmur and
are dissatisfied. I do not endeavour to deceive myself,
nor to deceive them, nor to aid them in deceiving them
selves. They will never prevail on me to do that. I am
a disciple of Socrates.

55
HERMES THE INTERPRETER

A TRAVELLER should be devout to Hermes, and I have
always loved him above the other gods for that charm
ing union which is found in him of youth with experience,
alacrity with prudence, modesty with laughter, and a ready
tongue with a sound heart. In him the first bubblings of
mockery subside at once into courtesy and helpfulness.
He is the winged Figaro of Olympus, willing to yield to
others in station and to pretend to serve them, but really
wiser and happier than any of them. There is a certain
roguery in him, and the habit of winking at mischief. He
has a great gift for dissertation, and his abundant eloquence,
always unimpeachable in form and in point, does not hug
the truth so closely as pious people might expect in a god
who, as they say sagaciously, can have no motive for lying.
But gods do not need motives. The lies of Hermes are
jests ; they represent things as they might have been, and

26o LATER SOLILOQUIES

serve to show what a strange accident the truth is. The
reproach which Virgil addresses to his Juno, " Such malig
nity in minds celestial ? " could never apply to this amiable
divinity, who, if he is a rascal at all (which I do not admit),
is a disinterested rascal. He has given no pawns to fortune,
he is not a householder, he is not pledged against his will to
any cause. Homer tells us that Hermes was a thief ; but
the beauty of mythology is that every poet can recast it
according to his own insight and sense of propriety ; as, in
fact, our solemn theologians do also, although they pretend
that their theology is a science, and are not wide awake
enough to notice the dreamful, dramatic impulse which
leads them to construct it. Now, in my vision, the thievery
of Hermes, and the fact that he was the patron of robbers,
merchants, rhetoricians, and liars, far from being unworthy
of his divine nature, are a superb and humorous expression
of it. He did not steal the cattle of Apollo for profit.
Apollo himself — a most exquisite young god — did not give
a fig for his cattle nor for his rustic employment ; in
adopting it he was doing a kind turn to a friend, or had
a love-lorn scheme or a wager afoot, or merely wished for
the moment to be idyllic. It was a pleasant scherzo (after
the andante which he played in the heavens, in his capacity
of sun-god and inspirer of all prophets) to lean gracefully
here on his herdsman's staff, or to lie under a tuft of trees
on some mossy hillock, in the midst of his pasturing kine,
and to hold the poor peeping dryads spellbound by the
operatic marvels of his singing. In purloining those oxen,
Hermes, who was a very little boy at the time, simply
wanted to mock these affectations of his long-haired elder
brother ; and Apollo, truly an enraptured artist and not
a prig, and invulnerable like Hermes in his godlike freedom,
did not in the least mind the practical joke, nor the ridicule,
but was the first to join in the laugh.

When Hermes consents to be the patron of thieves and
money-lenders it is in the same spirit. Standing, purse in
hand, in his little shrine above their dens, he smiles as if
to remind them that everything is trash which mortals can
snatch from one another by thieving or bargaining, and
that the purpose of all their voyages, and fairs, and high
way robberies is a bauble, such as the dirty children playing

HERMES THE INTERPRETER 261

in the street set up as a counter in their game. But
Hermes is not impatient even of the gutter-snipes, with
their cries and their shrill quarrels. He laughs at their
grimaces ; their jests do not seem emptier to him than
those of their elders ; he is not offended at their rags, but
sends sleep to them as they lie huddled under some arch
way or stretched in the sun upon the temple steps. He
presides no less benignly over thieves' kitchens and over
the shipyards and counting-houses of traders ; not that he
cares at all who makes the profit or who hoards the
treasure, but that sagacity and the hum of business are
delightful to him in themselves. He likes to cull the
passion and sparkle out of the most sordid life, and the
confused rumble of civilization is pleasant to his senses,
like a sweet vapour rising from the evening sacrifice.

His admirable temper and mastery of soul appear in
nothing more clearly than in his love-affair with the
beautiful Maia. She is ill-spoken of, but he is very, very
fond of her, and deeply happy in her love. It is a secret
relation, although everybody has heard of it ; but the
nymph is a mystery ; in fact, although everybody has
seen her at one time or another, no one has ever known
then that it was she. Hermes alone recognizes and loves
her in her own person, and calls her by her name ; but
privately. Sometimes, with that indiscretion and over-
familiarity which the young allow themselves in their cups,
his brothers ask him where he meets her ; and he only
smiles a little and is silent. She is said to be a wild un
manageable being, half maenad and half shrew; a waif
always appearing and disappearing without any reason,
and in her fitful temper at once exacting and tedious.
Her eyes are sometimes blue and sometimes black, like
heaven. Empty-headed and too gay, some people think
her ; but others understand that she is constitutionally
melancholy and quite mad. They say she often sits alone,
hardly distinguishable in the speckled sunshine of the
forest, or else by the sea, spreading her hair to the wind
and moaning : and then Hermes flies to her and comforts
her, for she is an exile everywhere and he is everywhere
at home. It is rumoured that in the ^ East she has had a
great position, and has been Queen or the Universe ; but

262 LATER SOLILOQUIES

in Europe she has no settled metaphysical status, and it
is not known whether she is leally a goddess, mistress
over herself, or only a fay or a phantom at other people's
beck and call ; and she has nowhere any temple or rustic
sanctuary or respectable oracle. Moreover, she has in
expressibly shocked the virtuous, who think so much of
genealogy, by saying, as is reported, that she has no idea
who is the father of her children. Hermes laughs merrily
at this, calling it one of her harmless sallies, which she
indulges in simply because they occur to her, and because
she likes to show her independence and to flout the sober
censors of this world. He is perfectly confident s^e has
never had any wooer but himself, nor would dream of
accepting any other. Even with him she is always reverting
to stubborn refusals and denials and calling him names ;
but when the spitfire is raging most angrily, he has only
to gaze at her steadily and throw his arm gaily about her,
as much as to say, " Don't be a fool," for her to be in
stantly mollified and confess that it was all make-believe,
but that she couldn't help it. Then it is wonderful how
reasonable she becomes, how perfectly trustful and frank,
so that no companion could be more deeply delightful.
She is as light as a feather, then, in his arms. The truth
is, she lives only for him ; she really has no children, only
young sisters who are also more or less in love with him
and he with them ; and she sleeps her whole life long in
his absence. In all those strange doings and wanderings
reported of her she is only walking in her sleep. The
approach of Hermes awakes her and lends her life — the
only life she has. Her true name is Illusion ; and it is
very characteristic of him, so rich in pity, merriment, and
shrewdness, to have chosen this poor child, Illusion, for
his love.

Hermes is the great interpreter, the master of riddles.
I should not honour him for his skill in riddles if I thought
he invented them wantonly, because he liked to puzzle
himself with them, or to reduce other people to a foolish
perplexity without cause. I hate enigmas ; and if I be
lieved that Hermes was the inspirer of those odious persons
who are always asking conundrums and making puns I
should renounce him altogether, break his statue, turn his

HERMES THE INTERPRETER 263

picture to the wall, and devote myself exclusively to the
cult of some sylvan deity, all silence and simple light. But
I am sure Hermes loves riddles only because they are no
riddles to him ; he is never caught in the tangle, and he
laughs to see how unnecessarily poor opinionated mortals
befool themselves, wilfully following any devious scent
once they are on it by chance, and missing the obvious for
ever. He gives them what sly hints he can to break the
spell of their blindness ; but they are so wedded to their
false preconceptions that they do not understand him, and
are only the more perplexed. Sometimes, however, they
take the hint, their wit grows nimble, their thoughts catch
fire, and insight, solving every idle riddle, harmonizes the
jarring cords of the mind.

The wand of Hermes has serpents wound about it,
but is capped with wings, so that at its touch the sting
and the coil of care may vanish, and that we may be
freed from torpor and dull enchantment, and may see,
as the god does, how foolish we are. All these mysteries
that befog us are not mysteries really ; they are the
mother-tongue of nature. Rustics, and also philosophers,
think that any language but theirs is gibberish ; they are
sorry for the stranger who can speak only an unintelligible
language, and are sure he will be damned unless the truth is
preached to him speedily by some impertinent missionary
from their own country. They even argue with nature,
trying to convince her that she cannot move, or cannot think,
or cannot have more dimensions than those of their under
standing. Oh for a touch of the healing wand of Hermes
the Interpreter, that we might understand the language of
the birds and the stars, and, laughing first at what they
say of us, might then see our image in the mirror of
infinity, and laugh at ourselves ! Here is a kindly god
indeed, humane though superhuman, friendly though in
violate, who does not preach, who does not threaten, who
does not lay new, absurd, or morose commands on our
befuddled souls, but who unravels, who relieves, who shows
us the innocence of the things we hated and the clearness
of the things we frowned on or denied. He interprets us
to the gods, and they accept us ; he interprets us to one
another, and we perceive that the foreigner, too, spoke a

264 LATER SOLILOQUIES

plain language : happy he if he was wise in his own tongue.
It is for the divine herald alone to catch the meaning of
all, without subduing his merry voice to any dialect of
mortals. He mocks our stammerings and forgives them ;
and when we say anything to the purpose, and reach any
goal which, however wantonly, we had proposed to our
selves, he applauds and immensely enjoys our little achieve
ment ; for it is inspired by him and like his own. May
he be my guide : and not in this world only, in which the
way before me seems to descend gently, quite straight and
clear, towards an unruffled sea ; but at the frontiers of
eternity let him receive my spirit, reconciling it, by his
gracious greeting, to what had been its destiny. For he
is the friend of the shades also, and makes the greatest
interpretation of all, that of life into truth, translating the
swift words of time into the painted language of eternity.
That is for the dead ; but for living men, whose feet must
move forward whilst their eyes see only backward, he
interprets the past to the future, for its guidance and
ornament. Often, too, he bears news to his father and
brothers in Olympus, concerning any joyful or beautiful
thing that is done on earth, lest they should despise or
forget it. In that fair inventory and chronicle of happiness
let my love of him be remembered.

THE END

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